Zohran Mamdani, the”Democratic-Socialist” (aka. Communist) who will be the next mayor of New York City, says he will end the gifted and talented program in elementary schools, and conservatives “pounced” on the news, arguing that this is a frontal attack on Asian-Americans who voted for him in the primary.
Former Mayor Bill de Blasio, not quite a Communist but married to one, announced his intentions in 2021 to phase out the gifted program for elementary schools, which has been accused of exacerbating segregation. The students qualifying for the program are substantially made up of Asians and whites, with Hispanics and black “under-represented” according to their percentage of the demographics. But unless you are a DEI nut case, it makes no sense to assign seats in an academically-gifted program by race, color or creed.
Under Mamdani’s plan, students who are in gifted classes now would remain in the program, but there would be no gifted program for kindergartners next fall, effectively terminating the program for the future.
Because Mamdani is an extreme leftist, everything he proposes is seen in that context, and probably should be. He wants to kill the program because it is an obvious affront to equity and inclusion: unfortunately, intellectual ability and promise do not spread themselves out equally among the populace. Yet his plan may be an example of wanting to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. What matters in the end is what is done, not why it is done.
I was in an “academically talented” program in my town’s public schools from the sixth grade through my graduation from high school. A group of 25 of us, all 11 or 12 years old—I was 11— from all the separate school districts were herded together in a single class with demanding PhD teacher and kept together, with occasional drop-outs and additions, for six years, through the teen years, puberty, and all that chaos. The track benefited me in many ways, and was a major factor in getting me admitted to Harvard.
However, even before the end of the program I became convinced that the segregation by perceived IQ and academic talents was a bad idea, and the school system eventually agreed with me. Being isolated from the other students led to widespread social dysfunction among us. A disproportionate number of my “AT” classmates ended up strange, unhappy, and isolated. Many of us were ostracized, but more importantly, we never learned how to interact with normal people until much later, if at all. I certainly didn’t learn that at Harvard or law school, and arguably I haven’t learned yet.
The worst aspect of the program, however, was that the students who needed competent teachers the least got them, and the students who needed them the most often did not. As I learned vividly in law school, the best students are assets to an entire class; yanking them out and putting them all in one class is like Major League Baseball having its All-Star team play a full schedule during the regular season against the other 15 talent-depleted squads.
If my experience suggested that the benefits to the so-called “gifted” students were so dramatic that the programs could be justified by a utilitarian calculation, I might feel differently. But they weren’t. In many ways, we suffered because of the segregation, and the less-talented students were harmed as well.
Mamdani may be right this time. At very least, his policy should be examined on its merits, and not dismissed automatically because he is the one proposing it.
Ethics Alarms 
Jack,
I understand your perspective from the socialization standpoint can adversely affect social development in teens and pre-teens but that could be a result of pigeon holes academics sort the children. Is it really necessary to place kids in highly differentiated academic strata such as “College Prep”, Vo-Tech, Business Ed etc. I think not.
Challenging students occurs in the classes they take not in the assigned homeroom which has one of the above designations. Labeling someone as gifted and talented can place unreasonable expectations on a child when he or she is struggling to keep up. Why shouldn’t a child who performs outstandingly well in one area be denied that opportunity if he or she is less capable in another area. Conceptually, variable curricula for each student would maximize the child’s potential for success. I feel for the poor Asian kid who does not meet the stereotype of being an academic prodigy in any or every subject.
Tracking also has a tendency to teach children that each of them is in a higher or lower caste level than another child. Hardly a lesson we should teach. I was in college prep until my grades were not up to snuff when it came to math and learning a foreign language that was necessary for college admissions. I got booted out. What I learned as a teen was that I did not measure up and could not achieve great things. College prep supposedly had the best teachers but none of these greats could get me past conjugating verbs in German. Nor did any of them have the ability to do anything but memorize theorems for geometry proofs. As a kid, I could find no value in reciting a proof of something that had long been decided. I want to know how to use this information.
It took nearly 10 years before I decided I could perform well enough in college. No I was not the summa cum laude grad but cum laude with a BS in Economics and Finance and later in grad school I graduated with a 4.0 GPA in the MBA program was enough to prove the point that I was “college material”.
I also agree that G&T programs are absolutely unnecessary and unwarranted in the earliest grades. Every parent believes their offspring are gifted and talented and that belief is strongly positively correlated to income level.
My only issue with the post is that I don’t believe that students who show great aptitude and promise will advance as well without great teachers. With that said, every student needs competent professional instruction. Thus, the thrust of any school system should be to find and retain only highly qualified personnel to facilitate learning. Trying to make the system “look like” the students they teach fails students. The goal should be ensuring that every member of the instructional team be held to the highest standards and those who cannot should be dismissed. The old saying that those who can, do and those who cannot, teach should be reworked to say that those who can, do and those who can do and teach are the ones needed in the classroom.
As a graduate of a gifted program myself, I disagree.
Local high school districts have, to my chagrin, already taken up the mission of “destreaming” — that is, consolidating what used to be parallel programs aimed at different achievement levels — and the value of gifted programs can easily be seen in what is lost when other program streams are combined.
For example, the “standard” streams in high school used to be “academic” and “applied”, generally speaking designed for those aiming for post-secondary education or not, respectively. Having been enrolled in the former and tutored students in the latter, it is an insurmountable difference in academic demand between the two. Indeed, with destreaming, new curricula present a difficulty level somewhere between the two, insufficiently challenging the bright and frustrating those less so. Smart kids are bored and unchallenged. Less smart kids still can’t keep up. Human nature is human nature and troublemakers tend to be in the latter group; their behaviours take up instructional time for the whole group.
Moreover, the benefit of gifted programs is echoed by the need for special education on the other end of the spectrum. Those with learning disability or severe neurodivergence (I hope we can at least agree) require targeted educational interventions. Sadly, it is also locally vogue to incorporate these students into regular classrooms, with expected effects: teachers spend more effort and time handling behaviors and underachievers and the brighter students are again shortchanged.
I get that nobody likes the optics of poor students lumped into their own “dumb kids” ghetto, but it is realistically required for their benefit. The curriculum is aimed at their needs and abilities (eg learning to budget instead of calculating the volume of a truncated disc), the teachers are more experienced in motivation and behaviour and class sizes and resources are adjusted to suit.
I also agree with (and experienced) the downsides of streaming that you (and Chris and Mamdani) worry about. It can perpetuate class differences and can instill in children the sense that they are more or lesser. It can demotivate struggling students and deny more successful students the opportunity to support slower peers. And, I and my peers were relatively socially outcast and remain, on average, fairly eccentric (but is this correlation or causation? Aren’t historic geniuses famously eccentric?).
But…those are challenges that should be addressed, not used as justification for destreaming. I certainly can’t see why the solution is to throw students who don’t fully comprehend multiplication and division in with those who are learning to balance ionic equations (literally the observed difference in ability between grade 12 “applied” and “AP” chemistry students, several moons ago). I think the better baseball analogy would be consolidating the MLB with peewee leagues and everything in between and expecting anything short of a disaster.
Tony,
I believe in offering students challenging courses without labels. You can identify students with above average talent and those who lag behind. I am not advocating that we wind up with all types of capabilities in the same class room. Those with learning disabilities need specialized instruction that cannot be had in the main. I will be the first to admit that I would have benefited immensely by being better prepped in Math even if it meant being placed with students who might not otherwise be in my more advanced classes.
What I am suggesting is that a student who excels in Math but seems to read at a lower grade level not be dumped into a program that serves the lowest common denominator skill wise. What I am arguing for is that tested student aptitude should drive class placement.
By keeping kids together who are academically aligned does not mean eliminating challenging courses for advanced students or forcing kids into classes in which the probability of failure is high, it just means we that tailor the course work and not the program label to the student.
I think, then, that we are mostly in agreement; I was thinking more of high school, where students could indeed take courses from different tracks according to their abilities, but indeed in local elementary schools you are either in the gifted program or not. Even then, however, I still see the value of offering a gifted program for those who qualify for it.
I think you are severely underestimating how disruptive the “gifted” kids can be when you bore them out of their skulls for 8 hours a day. I grew up in the military, bouncing from school system to school system, most of which had no gifted programs. I couldn’t understand why I was supposed to listen to someone explain things I already knew, and as a result my teachers spent my entire elementary school education years demanding my parents put me on Ritalin. I wasn’t uplifting anyone. I was reading ahead and teaching myself stuff in the back of the books while teachers screamed at me to stop trying to learn stuff and pay attention. They were explaining basic addition and subtraction in excruciating detail when I already knew how to do long division and fractions. I wanted to scratch my ears off. It was torture. I didn’t learn to be well socialized, I learned to ignore everyone when they were talking and hate school.
People are not cogs, and you can’t make the slower kids smarter by depriving the smart kids of learning. Having the smart kids do entire group projects might make the slower kids get better grades, but it doesn’t teach them anything. Not that I didn’t try, but the slower kids had no idea what I was talking about and would just snap at me to do the work and stop talking when I tried to explain things to them. It didn’t help anyone. Factory schooling is antiquated and needs to be replaced with personalized learning tracks.
I am in such complete agreement with Null Pointer here, having lived through all of it myself.
I think the lowest point was when I literally had to re-take a Geometry class–using the same textbook–in two successive years because my family had moved to a different State and the new school had no means of putting me in the math class with the next grade up like I’d been doing before.
I’ve always loved learning, but I also always viewed school as a prison–with the notable exception of the “Gifted Program” that I went to once per week all throughout elementary school.
–Dwayne
Why not follow the example of Scarsdale High School and label every course an AP course so the parents can brag about their kids as being “All AP”?
Isn’t that the truth. I was shocked when trying (unsuccessfully) to volunteer at the local high school that all the kids were taking “AP English” in grades eleven and twelve! What’s that all about? I guess it means they were all going to be taking the test at some point and they were going to get college credits?
Yes, you take a standardized test at the end of the course and if you score high enough most universities will let you skip past the corresponding college course. AP English would get you past English 101 in college and let you move straight to English 102 or whichever courses are locked behind English 101. Giving it to everyone, however, is pointless virtue signaling. If the class isn’t actually taught at the college level, then the students won’t pass the exam with high enough scores to get the college credit. If it’s actually taught at the college level and you give it to all 11th graders, most 11th graders will fail the class itself. If 11th graders were all already ready for college then why have 11th grade? Just send the students to college and be done with it.
NP wrote: “If 11th graders were all already ready for college then why have 11th grade? Just send the students to college and be done with it.” Some high schools that have a community college nearby do just that. My nephew spent 11th and 12th grades going to community college (for no extra charge!) earned college credits, was still able to run track at his high school, and this arrangement probably saved him from completely checking out of HS classes from boredom. High schools in nearby Eugene/Springfield have the same arrangement with the local community college.
In seventh grade in the early ’60s, a handful of us were placed into a “programmed learning” algebra program. We were each given wire ringed books where we were to work our way through the pages one item at a time while looking through a little cardboard framed window we were to move down the page as we completed an item. I don’t really remember the upshot. By eighth grade, the experiment was evidently over, and I took traditional instruction of algebra in ninth grade.
When I taught seventh grade at a parochial school in the ’70s, I was shocked to see the breadth of standardized testing percentiles in the class. The brightest kid (who became an engineer and married the cutest girl in the class, at an appropriate age) was probably in the 90th percentile. I had a set of twins who were, and I am not making this up, in single digits. Remarkably, all of the kids behaved and paid attention and were not a problem.
A year and a half later, when I was teaching in a diocesan high school, and finally got to teach the “smart” juniors, I found them boring. The “dumb” section were much more engaging. I concluded most of the “dumb” kids were dealing with issues at home and other matters that slowed them down. But if you paid attention to them and listened to what they had to say and seemed to care about them, they lit up like I don’t know what.
I felt guilty abandoning them to go to law school at the end of the semester.
Fast forward 30ish years, and you had people in my senior class who could not read well enough to answer fill in the blank questions. Basic pattern recognition was over their heads. I think the achievement gap is incomprehensible to people who went to high school back in the 60s and 70s. You can get a high school diploma now without the ability to read at a 2nd grade level or do basic arithmetic.
I do not know if I would have qualified for a gifted program, but my school did not offer more than one course in anything, except math. As a kid routinely called stupid from sixth grade through 12th by students and teachers alike, perhaps I would never have qualified, though I was valedictorian, which may have suggested otherwise. But I sincerely doubt that socialization is harmed by these “gifted” programs.
I had thought about talking about the academic disadvantages to a single track, but Null Pointer has a fantastic comment on that already, and I wouldn’t do it more justice.
Admittedly, I was bullied for my academics, as the kid who wrecked curves and sat in the classroom reading books instead of paying attention. However, it was not mainly academics that pushed me into the realm of the social pariah. I was significantly flatter and skinnier than most of my classmates in sixth grade and the clothing that was “in” literally fell off my body, so I didn’t wear it. I was not from a wealthy family, and my parents and grandparents always gathered a bunch of cheap wood pencils from sales and business giveaways for me to use at school. My mother often complained about the cost of school supplies, when she bought them off the school list, and I felt it would be ungrateful of me, after all that trouble, to ask them for mechanical pencils, which were the popular choice, granting me huge amounts of ridicule from my classmates. I stuck up for my choices and told folks to back off, making the physical punishments more severe, while the social punishments were already pretty much at maximum. I also had no interest in doing drugs and when I was given the offer to prove I was good enough to have friends by using drugs, I said no, emphatically, and if I am honest in my recollection, I did so rather obnoxiously. I also either would not let people cheat off of me, or, as was more common, if I felt that it wasn’t safe to say “no”, I’d do everything wrong and then, after they left, I’d redo the whole assignment correctly. My attitude probably didn’t help me much, admittedly.
I don’t know if a gifted program is a good thing, but I don’t think that avoiding one for socialization is a good justification. Socialization happens or doesn’t regardless of what buckets we put people in, and frankly, kids making the rules that being bullied for the brand name on your pencil or your ability to wear certain styles of pants or not consuming a variety of illegal substances makes less sense than struggling to interact with people who take easier/harder classes than you.
Interesting side question, and it may be peculiar to New York, but what does the Mayor of NYC have to do with school curriculum? Isn’t that that purview of the state and/or local school boards? Does the NYC Mayor control the NYC school system? In Houston, the mayor does not have voice in school board or curriculum decisions. That is governed by the Texas Education Agency and the local school districts. The mayor might criticize or voice an opinion it is only that – an opinion.
In NYC, the mayor appoints the superintendent, which I guess gives the mayor some authority or control over school goverance. Perhaps its would be that superintendent serves at the pleasure of the mayor?
jvb
My guess: It’s a peculiarity of the NYC system being so large, as well as NYC having a number of demanding and prestigious high school “exam schools” and it’s own City College system as well. My sense is the “exam schools” are insulated from the rest of the NYC school system, and symbiotic with…how to explain it? Let me try…
The “exam” high schools are probably symbiotic with the large number of highly ambitious k-12 students from families who live *inside the city limits* and who want a demanding curriculum so they can get into places like Cal Tech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, as well as the Ivies or the “best” state schools. To get into those schools is hard, especially if you need a lot of funding. Preparation to gain admission to those schools can be the intellectual equivalent of training to qualify and compete in a major marathon.
If you are a “striving” student you can find yourself at a serious disadvantage in competing at that level if you are in a classroom of slackers, time-servers, trouble makers, or just your average student.
In New York City, some of the students from the “One Percent” high income social elites will go to private fee-paying schools. For the ambitious poor, the answer is the “exam schools.”
In many American cities the solution is to move to a suburb, preferably a tony suburb, or to go to a pricey private school. Move away from the city and its problems. In an area like Rochester NY (where I live) those students are more likely to live in the suburbs.
Getting back to NYC, many of these competitive and ambitious students are from families of relatively modest means. Their parents may have come from Russia, Taiwan, S. Korea, or India and without much money. There is a critical mass of these students living inside the New York City district and they compete energetically to get into the small number of “exam schools” that you cannot attend unless you qualify through a demanding test.
The fact that it’s hard to get into the exam schools is a benefit–it excludes students who are low IQ, unserious, undisciplined, or disruptive.
That’s the background. How exactly NYC came to have this system is something I can’t explain, but it’s a thing. I speculate that were it not for the “exam schools” more of the ambitious students’ families would move into the suburbs. But NYC is huge, the suburbs are far away and the housing there is expensive. What to do if you just moved to Queens from Taiwan to start and run a small business and launch your children into the professional middle class in tech or medicine or engineering?
I’m from Upstate and don’t know the city well, even though I live in NY State. This is my crude understanding.
It’s worth noting that New York City has its own public colleges, separate from the SUNY system (the latter mostly bloomed under the New York State Rockefeller administration after World War Two). “City College of New York” was long ago full of ambitious youngsters from humble but still rising immigrant famlies, including Jews who mostly were barred from the Ivies. Sorry to digress. Read Irving Kristol or Gertrude Himmelfarb for details about the old days at CCNY.
The uber-sarcastic Steve Sailer drew attention to the class and ethnic differences between HS graduates from Stuyvesant (NYC public “exam high school”) and Horace Mann (old-money private tuition charging private high school).
Much of his post is a bit of a tangent to our exact point here. But basically we’re trying to discuss ambition, social class, etc.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/where-do-stuyvesant-hs-grads-vs-horace-mann-grads-go-to-coll/
charles w abbott
rochester NY
One final thought.
A good, serious, demanding HS education for STEM provides you with the opportunity to develop skills and habits and mindsets in high school that will carry you through a demanding college education.
Based on what I saw of people studying certain STEM majors in the late 1980s at SUNY Buffalo (UB, not Buff State) it wasn’t hard to start certain majors. The big challenge was attrition in the “weed out classes.” It led many students changing their major by the end of their sophomore year. Many people lacked the stamina, diligence, *sitzfleisch*, etc., to make it through the curriculum.
Rumor has it that UB eventually tweaked the structure of the program because the attrition rate was politically unpopular. Too many NY State residents had certain expectations of what should be possible for students at a comprehensive state university. Adjustments were made.
It’s my hypothesis that students want to go to the “exam schools” in the NYC high schools because they think they are getting a good preparation for demanding college level work.
JM wrote: “The worst aspect of the program, however, was that the students who needed competent teachers the least got them, and the students who needed them the most often did not.” Yes, I very much agree with this, both as an academically gifted person bouncing around various school systems and from my experience teaching. The most gifted and motivated students don’t really NEED that much — a few tips for direction, identification of resources, and otherwise don’t get in their way. If you get in their way or bore them, they will often find ways to entertain themselves that don’t really benefit the rest of the class.
The students who struggle are the ones that are the more interesting teaching challenge, and deserve to have the help of those most skilled at reaching them.
When teaching statistics to a class with quite diverse math backgrounds and aptitude, I found small group work to be helpful to both types of students. Struggling students are often more comfortable sharing with fellow students what they are confused about, and in the process of explaining a concept the more advanced students often discover the limits of their understanding. Teaching is a great way to discover the differences between what you understand superficially (you listened to the lecture, you read the book, you can pick the correct choice on a multiple choice question) and what you understand in depth.
I think you fail to understand what the entire communist mindset is about. Equity. Meaning that the lowest common denominator is the goal for everyone. They don’t want to raise anyone up. They want to tear everyone down to the lowest possible level so everyone will be “equal”.
They don’t want everyone to be middle class. They want everyone to be poor.
They don’t want everyone to be average, they want everyone to be stupid.
You cannot make people with low IQ smart, but you can make people with high IQ ignorant.
I spent many years in the DoD school system. They did not try and help everyone get good grades. They eliminated grades entirely. Snowflakes and stars and triangles instead of A’s and B’s and C’s. Getting in the students way was the entire point. Making the smart kids miserable and disruptive was the point. It wasn’t a side effect, it was a goal. They want everyone to be miserable and stupid, and they tried to mandate it by force. Most teachers happily played along.
Not all teachers. Some did exactly what you suggested. My fifth grade teacher tried her best to keep the smarter kids occupied and learning on their own. She tested everyone at the beginning of the school year on math and reading, and pulled the few of us who were ahead out and stuck us by ourselves. Took us to the high school library to check out books and told us to teach ourselves math.
This was less miserable than my previous school teachers, but it didn’t work. I went to the high school library and checked out books on Greek mythology. She took one look over my shoulder and took away what I was reading because books on weird sex with Greek gods and wives committing murder/suicide of their children and themselves because the husband cheated was not age appropriate. So she bought books and had them shipped overseas to make her own library for us to read. But it wasn’t enough. I could read a book a day, and she couldn’t afford to keep me in books. I sat around reading a damn dictionary because I was so bored. Higher level mathematics needed explanations she didn’t have time to give because the slower kids were falling behind. She taught us to crochet just to keep me quiet. I learned practically nothing my entire fifth grade year, even if I was less miserable.
Kids need to be taught whether they are smart or slow. It is not fair to treat everyone as being the same when they are not the same. It breeds resentment and misery. The slow kids hate the smart ones for being smart, and the smart ones hate themselves for being weird. This resentment turns into the behavior Sarah described. Bullying and nastiness.
School doesn’t need to be factory produced lord of the flies. Everyone could be supported if that was actually what was desired. That isn’t what the left wants, and the left dominates the public school system. They want everyone dumb, and that is what they are getting.
“Fair” is not equal outcomes. You are never going to get equal outcomes. Intelligence is a bell curve and pretending otherwise is stupid and naive. Fair is supporting everyone equally at learning. Making sure that second graders can all read, and making sure that the second graders who already read at a high school level get to learn something too.
I commend your fifth grade teacher for doing her best to not only direct you to resources, but actually acquire them. give you resources. I also had a teacher who took the approach of letting me spend class time (English class) in the library, where I worked my way methodically through the shelves, book, by book. The deliverable was that I had to write a book report for every book I read (so she DID know what I was reading), and as a result I learned at a relatively early age (I think I was 8 or 9?) how to write a review, a skill I have had the opportunity to practice for the rest of my life.
So many potential comments to make and so little time.
Just this morning I found this video of Ed Latimore being interviewed by Rob Henderson.
At just after 23:00 on the timer the speaker, Ed Latimore, said that in his middle school experience, it was hard to learn. Student learning was largely derailed by the…(wait for it)
“distorted ghetto pareto distribution”
of 5 to 8 students in the classroom who instigated trouble, leading more students to join in the chaos. It was hard to learn anything in that environment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb4KrdfSMB8
= – = – = – =
charles w abbott
rochester NY
Yet one more bit of evidence (none is actually needed) that one of the best features of my fragmented education as I was switched from one school to another is that I completely missed middle school. I have never encountered anyone who had a positive middle school experience.