The Gifted Island

New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is starting his revamp of the city’s gifted education program by limiting admission to only those students who score in the top 5 percent on two citywide exams. According to the NYT article, one of the tests used, the Bracken School Readiness Assessment, “gauges students’ understanding of colors, letters, numbers, sizes, comparisons and shapes.” But according to the results of an NCES study released today, sorting students based on a test is unlikely to address problems of equal access in NYC’s “gifted and talented” system.

Findings highlighted from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which assessed preschoolers’ knowledge and skills, included:

Children with two-parent families scored higher than children with single-parent families in several aspects of early literacy: letter recognition, or children’s ability to identify letters of the alphabet; phonological awareness, or understanding of the sounds and structure of spoken language; and conventions of print, or understanding such aspects as the reading of English text from left to right.

The percentage of children demonstrating proficiency in numbers and shapes ranged from 40 percent among lower socioeconomic status (SES) families to 87 percent in higher SES families.

Given these results, won’t the tests Chancellor Klein wants to use only reinforce existing socio-economic divisions among who participates in "gifted" programs, maintaining the heaviest concentration of “gifted and talented” in the wealthy Upper West Side of Manhattan?

Also, do we want to be testing and sorting kids before they even start school? Research from social psychologists indicates that labeling kids as “gifted” impacts both student and teacher expectations, and subsequently student academic success. It seems to me that offering a “gifted and talented” curriculum (i.e., engaging, challenging, creative) to all students wouldn’t be such a bad idea, rather than reserving these "islands of relatively happy functionality" for students who test well.