Desegregation Plan: Eliminate All Gifted Programs in New York

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A group of selective schools and programs geared to students labeled gifted and talented is filled mostly with white and Asian children. The rest of the system is open to all students and is predominantly black and Hispanic.

Now, a high-level panel appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio is recommending that the city do away with most of these selective programs in an effort to desegregate the system, which has 1.1 million students and is by far the largest in the country.

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He risks alienating tens of thousands of mostly white and Asian families whose children are enrolled in the gifted programs and selective schools. If a substantial number of those families leave the system, it would be even more difficult to achieve integration.

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The proposals, contained in a report to be released on Tuesday, may also face opposition from some middle-class black and Hispanic families that have called for more gifted programs in mostly minority neighborhoods as a way to offer students of color more access to high-quality schools.

Still, the plan could resonate with black and Hispanic families who believe that these selective programs unfairly divert money and attention from neighborhood schools.

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Gifted programs and screened schools have “become proxies for separating students who can and should have opportunities to learn together,” the panel, made up of several dozen education experts, wrote in the report.

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But Richard A. Carranza, the schools chancellor, made desegregation his signature issue when he took the job in 2018, denouncing racial inequality and promising sweeping action. He has specifically questioned whether too many students were being labeled “gifted.”

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The panel’s report, obtained by The New York Times, amounts to a repudiation of former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s education agenda, which reoriented the system toward school choice for families, including more gifted and screened schools, to combat decades of low performance.

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The panel recommended that the city replace gifted and screened schools with new magnet schools — which have been used in other cities to attract a diverse group of students interested in a particular subject matter — along with enrichment programs that are open to students with varying academic abilities.

If the mayor adopts the recommendations, elementary and middle schools would no longer be able to admit students based solely or largely on standardized exams or other academic prerequisites, and high schools would have diversity requirements.

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Last year, New York’s elementary school gifted classes enrolled about 16,000 students and were nearly 75 percent white and Asian. Black and Hispanic enrollment in the programs has plummeted over the last decade, after Mr. Bloomberg’s attempt to diversify them by creating a test-based threshold for admission backfired.

Still, the so-called School Diversity Advisory Group acknowledged that the city would have to take pains to prevent middle-class families from fleeing the system.

If those students decamp to private schools or to the suburbs, “it will become even more difficult to create high-quality integrated schools,” in New York, the report said. The panel wrote that “high-achievement students deserve to be challenged,” but in different ways.

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In order to integrate high schools, the panel recommended that the city not open any new screened high schools, eliminate geographic zones as a criterion for admission and should not consider lateness or attendance in evaluating prospective students.

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The widely varying quality of the city’s neighborhood elementary schools, which have become increasingly segregated since the 1970s, is the public school system’s most intractable problem.

Though Mr. de Blasio has vowed to create a school system where the idea of “good schools” and “bad schools” becomes obsolete, dozens of schools are extremely low-performing, and many more are struggling.

As the city has tried for decades to improve its underperforming schools, it has long relied on accelerated academic offerings and screened schools, including the specialized high schools, to entice white families to stay in public schools.

But at the same time, white, Asian and middle-class families have sometimes exacerbated segregation by avoiding neighborhood schools, and instead choosing gifted programs or other selective schools. In gentrifying neighborhoods, some white parents have rallied for more gifted classes, which has in some cases led to segregated classrooms within diverse schools.

The application system for gifted classes, which can begin when a child is 4, tends to favor savvy parents who have the flexibility to visit schools and, in some cases, the money to spend on test preparation.

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But it took years of often bitter debate for those politically progressive and racially diverse neighborhoods to finally adopt those plans.

Outside of those corners of the city, black and Hispanic children are more likely to be enrolled in schools with low test scores and scarce resources.

After only seven black students got into the city’s most elite public high school, Stuyvesant, some black and Hispanic alumni and elected officials called on Mr. de Blasio to expand gifted classes into poor and minority neighborhoods.

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