He’s taken to using synonyms like “honors” to persuade parents to take an interest, even if it doesn’t quite capture what the school is trying to offer students. That didn’t happen the way I wanted.”Ĭonvincing the black families in Kelly Miller’s neighborhood to enroll their children has been a challenge, partly because for many the term “gifted and talented” was a foreign concept, Zaki says. When Kelly Miller launched its gifted program last fall, principal Abdullah Zaki says he “thought it would be a big clamor throughout our community-parents rushing to get their kids into our building. The district opened one gifted program in a middle school near the affluent blocks around Georgetown University.īut simply allowing all comers to participate in gifted education doesn’t erase its problems. The decision comes as many city neighborhoods are experiencing a surge of new middle-class, white families, and one reason for the reintroduction of gifted classes is to entice more of them to choose public, not private, schools. schools have reintroduced gifted education. This year, for the first time in more than a decade, the D.C. Is there a better way to provide education for gifted children without exacerbating racial inequities? Officials in the Washington, D.C., public schools believe they’ve found a possible answer. They must also be trained to “cut through” stereotypes, she says, so that talented children who are also poor or from a racial minority are not overlooked. The society suggests that parents and teachers check a list of traits, including whether children are “perfectionist and idealistic,” “ asynchronous,” or “problem solvers.” Smutny says teachers should be trained to look for a different set of characteristics, such as creativity, well-developed imaginations, and curiosity, which she says are correlated with above-average intelligence. suburbs and other places, gifted and talented programs have the same dynamic. So the question is, should they keep expanding the program? As a recent New York Times article noted, “The accelerated classrooms serve as pipelines to the city’s highest-achievement middle schools and high schools, creating a cycle in which students who start out ahead get even further advantages from the city’s schools.” In the D.C. Given the decrease in the number of schools offering the program and the declining percentage of minorities in the program, it follows that the new seats are probably concentrated in just a few schools, many of them in affluent areas. The neighborhoods that lost gifted and talented programs tended to be those with high concentrations of blacks and Hispanics: Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, Flatbush, Washington Heights.Īsked about the changes, department officials said they have actually increased the number of gifted and talented seats in recent years to meet growing demand. There were only about 140 schools with gifted classrooms that year. By 2009, many of those programs had been shuttered. In 2006, before it changed the admissions system, New York City opened 15 new gifted and talented programs to serve more minority children, bringing the number of schools with the programs to more than 200, according to officials at the time.
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