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New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

nytimes.com

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

#141

Post by xboxnolifes »

geofft wrote: post #109
_hilro wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a school system or program doesn't have enough black kids in it, it is by definition segregated. No, it is literally not "by definition" segregated. Using the phrase 'by definition' is not that powerful a modifier that every word that surrounds it suddenly becomes true. That's the most nonsense thing ever. Secondly, read the line I quoted: > highly selective and racially segregated program The program is not rac…

I grew up in a school district in the deep south that was racially segregated, as found by the court system, until a month before I graduated. This was in 2006. Not last century. The school district didn't, of course, test people by race or have a Colored Students High School or whatever. What they did was to put schools and school zones in ways that happened to line up with strong demographic differences in swaths o…

Which I agree would be racially segregated. But the original comment stated that the determiner was "not enough blacks" not "intentionally setting school boundaries to avoid blacks".

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

#144

Post by notwedtm »

darthvoldemort wrote: post #136
silicon2401 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in NYC, Asians are the poorest demographic by a large margin. Do you have evidence for this? Asians are by far the richest minority in the US so I was surprised by this statement. > Activists have no problems openly discriminating against Asians because whites, blacks and Latinos think of "Americans" as whites, blacks and Latinos. Asians are considered foreigners. So when a prestigious program is dominated by Asian…

http://www.roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu/?forum-post=resear...

This links to https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/opportunity/pdf/20_poverty_measu... as the original source. On page 28 of this file, you get to the actual statistics. While Asian poverty is certainly high, it is about the same as other minorities, and has been decreasing since 2014.

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

#145

Post by foxhop »

Gifted & Talented program isn't racist, critical race theory & social marxism redefines the term racism so they may point at any program and call it racist. My son qualifies and it costs the school system nothing. It's mostly about transport to middle school for higher math for him.

Reference:

    "New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program.  Students who are currently enrolled in gifted and talented classes will not be affected. But the highly selective and racially segregated program will be replaced for incoming students."

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

#147

Post by padastra »

InitialLastName wrote: post #127
0xB31B1B wrote: post #18

I am generally quite liberal but I strongly disagree with he current strain of progressive education reform. There are inherent differences within the capabilities of students, we can detect these early, and we should use them to provide students with appropriate challenges. Our education system should provide avenues for top students to excel, ad hopefully these top students become the people who create businesses o…

The problem with the G&T program was that it did a better job of selecting for parental affluence (the ability to pay 4-5 figures for test prep for your toddler, and the time to navigate a byzantine system) than for inherent differences in student capabilities. Strangely enough, there were also a very limited number of G&T programs, including none in many of the poorer areas of the city, so if you lived in, say, the…

There are numerous sources in this thread that show that the Asian group, highly selected for here, are predominantly poor. Just parroting a talking point without looking at the data is as idiotic as what we all accuse Trump supporters of.

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

#148

Post by [deleted] »

seibelj wrote: post #88
tapoxi wrote: post #28

My brother teaches at an exam school in Boston which similarly had its requirements dropped recently, and it seems like a lot of these changes are poorly thought out and done for optics. Sure, some of the exam schools in BPS are overwhelmingly White/Asian, but the school he teaches at is mostly Black/Asian/Hispanic. While he was previously able to teach classes of bright, focused students, now they need to break up f…

Boston has one of the highest per-pupil funding in the US. Yet excluding the exam schools, the majority of the schools are awful. Here is the school my kids would have to go to if I wasn’t rich enough to go private: https://www.publicschoolreview.com/the-english-high-school-p... Ranked 1644 out of 1667 in Massachusetts. In 2018, the vice principal of anti gang violence was convicted of recruiting students there to de…

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by bloooop »

threatofrain wrote: post #105
bloooop wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to realize that the program is segregated by intent and by design. The segregation is NOT accidental. That's true of many of the gifted-and-talented programs in the US. That's not fundamental, and not true of many of the gifted-and-talented programs worldwide. Worldwide, such programs are meritocratic pathways to socioeconomic mobility. In the US, the story is much more complex. Most such programs were…

Under your perspective, were NY gifted and talented programs designed to exclude blacks but include Asians (among the poorest demographics in NYC) as the largest plurality? And why?

No. They were designed from a lineage of decisions intended to exclude blacks and to include whites. That's not my perspective; that's a historical fact. That's why I referenced a Dept. of Education OCR report, which in turn references National Academies publications and similar sorts of credible references, all predating the current social justice political climate.

How decisions made in the eighties and sixties impact families in 2020 is sort of complex. Now, I move away from fact to my perspective. My perspective is that many Asian immigrant families are more likely to:

- Come from a culture which values education, and especially measurable outcomes in education (e.g. math, rather than creativity)

- In some cases, come from cultures with 2000+ year histories of civil service exams and meritocracy

- Often lack the same sorts of wealth or support networks as American families, which puts a lot more pressure on having kids become self-supporting and independently successful

- Are less likely to be successful in fields which rely on having strong US-based social networks than white families, which also pushes towards areas like STEM.

... a plethora of effects like these leads to immigrant (and especially Asian immigrant) families being heavily over-represented within the system which was resulted.

On the other hand, if my family was on the Mayflower, and my uncle can get my kid a job at his law firm, my aunt can hook him up with a management position in her marketing firm, and if neither does that, at least we own the house and he can always live here, there's a lot less pressure. I have a lot more incentive to let kids be kids, let kids play more, and school less.

So immigrants, and especially Asian immigrants, now tend to do well in this system. It continues to discriminate against blacks, though.

Why is this hard to accept?

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

#150

Post by mcculley »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #18

I am generally quite liberal but I strongly disagree with he current strain of progressive education reform. There are inherent differences within the capabilities of students, we can detect these early, and we should use them to provide students with appropriate challenges. Our education system should provide avenues for top students to excel, ad hopefully these top students become the people who create businesses o…

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 makeup of the gifted, honors, and standard classes would have been much different.

(I graduated high school in 1990. Maybe things are much different now. I would have no way to know.)

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