Giftedness
"The Mirage of the Gifted Child?"
From New York magazine:
The Mirage of the Gifted Child
Critics say the process we use to identify bright kids is flawed and insular. But what if giftedness itself is a lie?
New Yorkers are awfully smart, so it’s hardly surprising that they try to get their kids into gifted programs.
Granted, a lot of white New Yorkers assume they should pay for their kids to enroll in private schools.
Granted, anti-public schoolism is especially true of Asians, who tend to believe that, even though they just recently arrived in the USA, they deserve to not pay taxes. In contrast, white parents tend to assume that they must pay gigantic amounts of private school tuitions because whaddaya whaddaya gonna do? Expect taxpayers to chip in for your kid?
Being “gifted” — and by that I mean smart — has been woven into my sense of self for so long that it has become one of the surest things I know about myself. I was reading at age 4. And though I hated math by kindergarten, I excelled in art, reading, and writing, and every teacher loved me.
Maybe authors who hated math by kindergarten shouldn’t discourse on statistics?
… For nearly a century all across America, shrewd parents have known that the best first step in a child’s academic life is to get them into a gifted program, like the one I attended, where they can have an academic experience that is stimulating and confidence-boosting, that sets them apart from the pack.
Well, yeah, the point is to get then in with other smart kids.
They understand that a Gifted and Talented, or G&T, program in elementary school broadens a child’s intellectual horizons, which then places them on a course toward honors classes in middle school and AP classes in high school. All of this culminates, finally, in the strategic launch of the child toward “a very good college,” maybe even one in the Ivy League. The first plotted point on the ascent is vital — it’s what makes the rest possible.
Many of these shrewd parents also know that in many parts of the U.S., G&T has a race problem. As of 2022, roughly 60 percent of American students enrolled in a gifted program are white, though recent data shows that white children are only around 40 percent of the total public-school population — a disparity that has been in place for as long as G&T has existed. The gap is apparent in New York. bvi
Obviously, high IQ blacks tend to go to celebrity-rich private schools like Dalton rather than to high IQ Asian schools like public Stuyvesant.
Recent figures on the city’s kindergarten G&T enrollment indicate that white and Asian students are vastly overrepresented relative to their proportion of the city’s student body. The Anderson School, a citywide K–8 gifted institution, barely cracks double digits for Latino students and admits even fewer Black students; the stats for another K–8 citywide gifted school, NEST+M, are no better. The trend continues in high school. Of the 781 students accepted to the highly competitive Stuyvesant High School last year, eight were Black.
Well, duh…
Why would you use your racial privilege to send your kids for free to Stuyvesant rather than to Dalton?
Among the city’s other eight specialized high schools, 3 percent of offers went to Black students while 6.9 percent went to Latino students. Combined, Black and Latino students make up roughly two-thirds of the city’s public-school population.
“These disparities have helped to make G&T a perennial subject of debate, particularly in New York City, where it has bedeviled mayors for years. At the moment, the city’s families with school-age children are waiting to learn how Mayor Zohran Mamdani plans to reshape (or extinguish) G&T, an issue he touched on during his campaign. While he has made plain his distaste for pre-kindergarten G&T testing and feels the third-grade entry point is more logical (Mamdani himself is the product of a specialized public high school, the Bronx High School of Science), thus far no action has been taken.
Third grade is obviously more reliable of an IQ test than four years earlier.
Paywall here.
