Fewer Children Entering Gifted Programs
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/nyregion/30gifted.html
I came across this article that i thought was interesting. The title stated: Fewer Children Entering Gifted Programs. When i began to read the article that was based on New York i found interesting that the number of children entering New York City public school gifted programs dropped by half this year from last under a new policy intended to equalize access, with 28 schools lacking enough students to open planned gifted classes, and 13 others proceeding with fewer than a dozen children.
So then i thought to myself, why have the numbers dropped so dramatically since last year. Well the answer is that the policy, which based admission on a citywide cutoff score on two standardized tests, also failed to diversify the historically coveted classes.
In a school system in which 17 percent of kindergartners and first graders are white, 48 percent of this year’s new gifted students are white, compared with 33 percent of elementary students admitted to the programs under previous entrance policies. The percentage of Asians is also higher, while those of blacks and Hispanics are lower.
In his 2005 State of the City address, Mayor Michael Bloomberg promised to maintain all of the city’s existing gifted programs while creating more in “historically underserved districts.”
Department of Education officials said this week that they had not intended to reduce gifted enrollment radically, but were satisfied in the knowledge that all children in the programs had cleared the same hurdle. Previously, the city had a hodgepodge of programs with varied admissions requirements; in 2007, when the city required applicants to take the same tests but did not set a uniform cutoff, some were filled with students who had scored extremely low.
City officials said that in an effort to broaden next year’s gifted enrollment, they planned to create citywide programs based in Brooklyn and Queens — currently, the three such programs that have a higher admissions standard are all in Manhattan — and begin all gifted programs in kindergarten; 38 percent now begin in the first grade. But they have no plans to change the tests or the 90th percentile cutoff (which was lowered from 95th percentile because too few children met the higher standard).
Problems with the new admissions policy surfaced in June showed that children from the city’s poorest districts were offered a smaller percentage of gifted slots than in the previous year, while children in the city’s wealthiest districts captured a greater share. The new data and analysis go further by looking at actual enrollment and the race of students, information the city could not previously provide.
The incoming gifted class is 9 percent Hispanic, 13 percent black and 28 percent Asian. Their kindergarten and first-grade peers in the city are 41 percent Hispanic, 27 percent black and 15 percent Asian. Students admitted to gifted programs under the previous policies are 15 percent Hispanic, 31 percent black and 20 percent Asian.
What i also found to be some useful information from this website to help me make out the article was that gifted programs are located in schools with fewer minority students, and there are fewer blacks and hispanics enrolled in them. The disparity has grown under a revised testing requirment. It seems that in this country a minority has a larger struggle to find success. Why is it that gifted programs and various other programs as well, go to those who are not of minority. The system has flaws and i don’t believe that it will be fixed for years and years to come, if that.
