Introduction

When I was in second grade, I remember my dad driving me to my school district’s administrative office. Once I got there, I met this man who introduced himself as a learning specialist, and I spent about an hour and a half doing brain teasers and puzzles with him. The next week, my teacher pulled me aside and told me I’d been selected for the school’s gifted and talented program. For the rest of my elementary and middle school education, I spent a few hours a week in a classroom with fellow “gifted” kids, working on projects and competitions. Overall, it was a pretty fun experience, and the program worked well for me; I made a lot of friends, got more engaged with school, and earned good grades. Nationwide, however, gifted programs have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years for deepening achievement gaps and promoting inequality. In this post, I will go over some of these issues.

New York City

While there is a national movement for dismantling gifted programs and accelerated tracks, in this post, I will focus solely on New York City, due to the unique nature of its academic system and current political debate over this topic. To give some background, there are currently eight elite public high schools in New York City. Admissions to these schools are determined by their performance on an exam called the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). Students who excel on this exam are sent to these eight high schools (which rank among the highest-performing in the country), while the rest of the students are sent to public schools across the city. While this may seem like a meritocratic practice, it only takes a cursory glance at the demographics of these schools to realize the systemic inequality rooted in them:

Even though the city is majority Hispanic and Black, less than ten percent of the students in these specialized schools are. Last year, the New York City government came out with a report recommending the desegregation of all schools in the city, stating that the current system is inherently geared in favor of white and Asian students, and geared against Hispanic and black students. High schools, such as NEST+m shown below, require students to score at least a 97% on the exam to get admission.

Former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, whose office commissioned the report, has been trying to reform the system for years. In 2018, he suggested phasing out the entrance exam completely, and sending top-performing kids in middle schools to high schools across the city. The graphic below from Vox illustrates this process:

However, this approach has not been met without backlash. Many Asian Americans have been vocal about their grievances about acceptance into elite universities, saying the system holds them to higher standards than students of any other race. “[De Blasio] never had this problem when Stuyvesant [High School] was all white. He never had this problem when Stuyvesant was all Jewish”, said Kenneth Chiu, and alumnus of one of the elite high schools, about de Blasio’s plan in 2018. “All of a sudden, they see one too many Chinese and they say, ‘Hey, it isn’t right’.”