BY JONATHAN ROSENBERG
Jonathan Rosenberg is chair of the Committee on Education and the Law of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

March 15, 2005

Any time a city official even hints at the possibility of changing programs for the gifted, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg did last month, there is a hue and cry. Parents of children in New York City's public school gifted programs fear that their child's program might be eliminated or that the admission policy to their child's program may change in a way that lessens the program's quality by admitting less gifted students.

For many thousands of minority and immigrant parents in the city, however, gifted programs are seen as the near-exclusive preserve of middle-class and affluent white families. And with good reason: Some of the city's gifted programs have operated in ways that are fundamentally unfair. They exclude many students who are gifted but whose parents do not learn about the programs until it is too late to apply. They exclude many gifted students whose intelligence is not revealed by the IQ tests that are used for admission. And they exclude many students whose first language is not English and for whom the entry tests are not available in their native language.

In many of the city's gifted programs, the admission process is open to pre-kindergarteners, whose parents mostly hear about the programs through word of mouth. District outreach about the programs is limited, and children of minority and immigrant parents are greatly underrepresented in the applicant pool. When their children enter kindergarten, many of these parents discover that there is a gifted program but that they missed the window to apply. Few slots open up in the program for students in kindergarten or higher grades.

For those who do learn about a gifted program during the application window, the admission criteria are not based on classroom observation or student performance in school, because the 4-year-old applicants have not yet entered the public schools. Instead, a high score on an IQ test is often an admission requirement, even though giving one of these tests to a 4-year-old reveals as much about the kinds of opportunities to which the child has been exposed as it does about actual giftedness.

In one city district examined several years ago, the data showed that white kindergarteners were 16 times more likely to be in the gifted program than their nonwhite peers. Do we really believe that white 4- and 5-year-olds are 16 times more likely to be gifted than minority children of the same age? To the contrary, the limited outreach about the program, the location of the schools in which it was implemented (which were in the more middle-class areas of the district) and the use of an IQ test all conspired to make the program almost exclusively for the benefit of white middle-class and affluent families.

Most education experts believe that giftedness can mean many things, that there should be multiple criteria for admission to gifted programs and that gifted programs should start in second grade or later, so that teachers have had at least two years to observe students and assess their capabilities and talents.

So why do so many of the city's programs begin in kindergarten? One reason may be that middle-class and affluent families can apply to the program before they decide whether to enroll their children in the public schools. If their children are not admitted, they can consider other options such as private school or moving to the suburbs.

One result is that a largely minority elementary school might have five classrooms in each grade, one of which is mostly white (the gifted program), while the rest are mostly minority. The messages sent to young children by this kind of segregated schooling reinforce racial stereotypes, even if the reasons for the segregation are more complex than the kind of de jure segregation that was outlawed half a century ago.

Of course parents want challenging programs for their children, programs that support children of high intelligence and great talent. Gifted programs can help serve this need, but they should do so through effective outreach to all parents and through admission procedures that do more than reflect a family's affluence and opportunity. If the Department of Education's efforts to reform gifted programs accomplish this, they should be applauded, not condemned.

Copyright (c) 2005, Newsday, Inc.