New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program • Hacker News Board

Re: New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

#251

Post by astkaasa » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 8:38 AM UTC

disambiguation wrote: post #194

kind of tangential.. but i'm constantly baffled by how antiquated our K-12 education system is. 8am - 2pm, a few dozen kids in 1 class room, 1 teacher, 1 white board, shuffled from one class to the next, school bells, homework, midterms, final exam. compare this side by side with schooling 200 years ago, and not much has changed. i can't understand why education hasn't been open sourced and unified.. an why there isn…

> 8am - 2pm, a few dozen kids in 1 class room, 1 teacher, 1 white board, shuffled from one class to the next, school bells, homework, midterms, final exam.

It's more or less the same pattern in universities. Why do you consider it outdated?

Re: New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

#252

Post by flexie » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 10:39 AM UTC

darthvoldemort wrote: post #124

flexie wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it's not intended by design to segregate based on color, but just an unfortunate effect, when that effect is known for years and nothing is done, then I think it's OK to call it segregation. Many of the parents I know who has kids that were accepted in the gifted and talented program had very expensive tutoring in order to be accepted. We are talking thousands of dollars for toddlers. That's tutoring that mos…

The G&T program in NYC is mostly ASIAN not white. This is the problem for activists. Also, Asians are the poorest demographic in NYC so activists can't blame systemic racism or economic disadvantages. So better to just destroy the program than explain why Asians who are non-white and poor are able to succeed when other minorities can't.

Asians in NYC are only the poorest demographics if you include the large, and poor and growing groups of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, Arab, Iraqi, Syrian etc. immigrants in your definition of Asian. Those are not the Asians overrepresented in the G&T program.

And yes, I know those countries are in Asia.

Re: New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

#253

Post by nobody9999 » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 1:32 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #250

darthvoldemort wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know nothing about teaching and education if you think this is going to help. It's going to hurt even more. The reason why you group children with similar learning abilities together is so that they can progress together. If you stick advanced kids with less advanced kids, both sets of kids will suffer because the advanced kids will be extremely bored and the less advanced kids will get discouraged because the ad…

> You know nothing about teaching and education That is incorrect. > The reason why you group children with similar learning abilities together is so that they can progress together. Yes, that's the thinking that justified tracking. Among the problems with segregated G&T programs, however, is that G&T-identified and non-G&T students are not, within each group, “of similar learning abilities”; Both have wide variation…

>It’s not the 1980s any more. Education has moved forward. Whether NYC will execute this well is, of course, up in the air. But that what it has identified is what has been widely used and proven better than binary tracking already, for the students that would be tracked into G&T, for the students that would not, for racial and socioeconomic class equity, and in basically every other conceivable manner is not up in the air.

I'm replying here to your reply ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806171 ) to my comment.

You make a bunch of really good points. I haven't been in the NYC public schools in nearly 40 years and the elementary schools in nearly 50, so I was unaware that the G&T programs weren't actually housed and run within each school.

In fact, when I was in elementary school (1971-1978), the gifted and talented programs were just getting started, and were housed within neighborhood schools[0] as a separate track.

After reading your (and a bunch of other) comments, I realized (as you already knew) that G&T programs had been moved to completely separate schools. Which is a terrible implementation of G&T.

But even back then, only a small number of city schools had those programs at all (they certainly didn't at mine -- PS 84 and JHS 117).

I was just a kid, so I don't know what justifications were made for moving all G&T programs out of the neighborhood schools.

There should be G&T (or some tracked analog) in every city school, something to which you alluded.

tl;dr: You were absolutely correct. My comments were based on an understanding that was decades out of date.

[0] https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/metrocenter/metro-learning/spoils...

Re: New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

#254

Post by nobody9999 » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #242

nobody9999 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Diversity means increasing representation. In a situation with limited resources, increasing representation for all means decreasing representation for some. This is the natural conclusion to pushing for equality/representation. Except the problem isn't with the gifted/talented programs in NYC. And it isn't with the SHSAT[0] either. The problem is that public elementary and middle schools in majority black/hispanic…

> The problem is that public elementary and middle schools in majority black/hispanic neighborhoods have measurably much worse educational results. Are the students doing poorly in those schools because they are poorly run/staffed/and funded, or is it the case that the students in those schools have more problems at home leading to poorer results? In other words, is this a problem schools can fix at all?

>Are the students doing poorly in those schools because they are poorly run/staffed/and funded, or is it the case that the students in those schools have more problems at home leading to poorer results?

There has been research (don't have it handy right now) that there's a negative feedback loop with that.

Schools in poor areas tend to have less parental involvement (and direct economic support from those parents as is common in wealthier neighborhoods), so school staff don't have as many resources and aren't as incentivized to raise expectations of the students.

That creates an environment where the students aren't learning as well as in other neighborhood schools.

I suspect that if the authority figures on either side of that raise their expectations and requirements of the students, the negative feedback loop can be, at least partially, short-circuited.

>In other words, is this a problem schools can fix at all?

Yes. They can't do as much as schools with significantly more parental involvement, but improving the teacher/staff performance would likely improve parent performance.

No, it's not a panacea, but blaming all this on poor parenting and throwing up our hands just promotes the centuries-old trope that "poor people are morally and intellectually inferior. It's obvious, if they weren't so they wouldn't be poor."

That's circular reasoning and doesn't reflect reality.

Re: New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

#255

Post by otoburb » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 2:20 PM UTC

darthvoldemort wrote: post #119

The inconvenient truth about NYC G&T program is that it is 40% Asian. Asians have dominated the G&T program, even "stealing" spots from white kids where 43% of NYC is white, but only 35% of spots taken by white kids. And Asians are dominating the NYC G&T program NOT because of hundreds of years of systemic racism, NOT because Asians wrote the admissions tests an inbueing cultural bias, and NOT by cheating or bribing…

Another inconvenient truth is that there is a great example of an integrated G&T school student body in East Harlem whose racial profile [1] closely matches the racial distribution of applicants for the G&T kindergarden test[2].

Two problems arise when trying to raise the profile of the school:

1) This is one of the only good examples of integration, but nobody seems to be interested in learning how to replicate this model high performance and integration across the rest of NYC's schools.

2) Draws unwelcome attention to the pipeline problem whereby some ethnic groups are underrepresented compared to the city's ethnic makeup when applying for the test.

[1] https://www.publicschoolreview.com/tag-young-scholars-profil... (scroll down to "All Ethnic Groups")

[2] https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/1c478c_f14e1d13df45444c883bbf... (page 26)

Re: New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

#256

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 2:24 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

#257

Post by otoburb » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 2:51 PM UTC

MyHypatia wrote: post #135

When I read the headline I was upset, why get rid of a program that challenges eager young minds? Then I read that the current system tests 4 year olds, and puts these kids on separate tracks. 4 year olds! I'm all for challenging different kids with different levels of material, but the current system of testing and separating kids out starting at 4 years old is absurd. That being said, I think by age 8 (3rd grade) i…

An oft-missed option that NYC offers is that children can continue testing for the G&T programs up to Grade 3. So parents can enter when the child is 7 years old to enter into grade 3 (when they usually are 8 years old).

Re: New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

#258

Post by legolas2412 » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 3:01 PM UTC

Zababa wrote: post #198

bitwize wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you reconcile this view with the fact that asians were also discriminated against, but now do better than whites? There are places where blacks do better than whites. In the Bronx, New York, the standard of living went up because of an influx of Afro-Caribbean immigrants who made more than the local white population. But minorities with an earned advantage are outside consideration of equity policy, which is…

Thanks again for all the explanation and the civil conversation. I guess the only things that stays a mystery for me is why the focus on race, especially when you said that they focus on poor people inside that group?

I've always felt that America always looks everything from the lens of race. Class problems specially are casted as a race problem. I personally think this is the leftover of 1960-70s, when class differences were a taboo because of the red scare, and race differences were being fought against for civil rights. The end result is that even in legitimat class differences like in access to education, it is only seen through the lens of race.

Re: New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

#259

Post by legolas2412 » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 3:03 PM UTC

Zababa wrote: post #202

ziml77 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that holding people back in an attempt to boost up others will amount to anything good. If you hold white people back to give black people a chances, the white people are going to hate black people that much more. It's certain to lead to worse issues with racism.

I'm not sure that's a given. For example, does paying taxes that depend on how much you earn leads to more hate and more issues?

Different treatment based on something you can't control like your race is discrimination. And very few people like discrimination, specially against themselves

Re: New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

#260

Post by mcculley » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf wrote: post #229

mcculley wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, kids are different. That does not mean that existing systems do a good or fair job of determining which kids would benefit from special programs. My experience being in a "gifted" program in middle and high school in Florida was that the students in the program had parents who knew enough to get them tested. That alone marks a privileged class. I sincerely believe that if every student had been tested, the makeu…

The difference is what you describe, every kid takes the tests now because they are standardized.

Interesting. Is this true for all U.S. school districts? I am very surprised to learn that all kids are being I.Q. tested.