{snip}

Welcome to America’s gifted and talented debate. From major cities to suburban districts, the question of how to identify and educate advanced students has emerged in recent years as one of the most volatile issues in public education.

{snip}

More than three million U.S. public school students are estimated to be enrolled in gifted programs. But those programs are a lightning rod, because the divide between who gets in and who is left out often falls along lines of race, income and disability status.

Imagine two students: one from an especially affluent household and another whose family lives well below the poverty line. Both perform at the same level in their core classes. Yet the child from the affluent family will be twice as likely to receive gifted services, research shows.

That divergence has generated federal civil rights complaints accusing big districts such as Los Angeles of failing to provide all children with an equal education.

{snip}

Gifted and advanced education is sometimes regarded as a niche concern, especially when schools face daunting challenges, including widening achievement gaps and alarming declines in 12th-grade reading and math skills. The debate is often deeply emotional because some of these programs were formed with an explicit goal of keeping middle-class white families in public schools who might otherwise have fled amid integration.

{snip}

Nowhere has an admissions system inspired more national controversy than in New York City. For more than a decade, 4-year-olds were required to ace a high-stakes test to gain acceptance to an intensely competitive gifted and talented program.

Today, preschool teachers instead nominate students to enter a lottery. The selection rubric is broad: Is a child curious about new experiences? Does she exhibit a sense of accomplishment when completing a task? Does he help others and show empathy?

{snip}

In New York City, the leading candidates in the mayoral race — Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat, and Andrew M. Cuomo, who is running as an independent — agree that gifted education has been too exclusive for too long. But they clash over competing visions: whether to roll back gifted education or expand it.

Alone, neither option may solve all the system’s problems.

Take Massachusetts, whose public education is regarded as world class and where researchers tracked high-performing third graders throughout their school years. The findings were startling: By sixth grade, the number of Black, Latino and low-income students who remained top performers had plummeted compared with their white and Asian counterparts.

It was taken as evidence that the state — where gifted programs are rare — was failing tens of thousands of its most vulnerable students, while well-off families could seek tutoring outside of school to ensure their children advanced.

{snip}

In cities including Washington, where public school leaders say they do not believe in placing students “on a restrictive track,” schools offer more in-depth instruction for children who share common interests in areas such as robotics or design.

And some, including the largest public school system in Virginia, have retreated from labeling children as gifted, worrying that the term is outdated, rife with stereotypes and a false signal that some pupils naturally thrive on innate talent.

{snip}

The post Why America’s Debate Over Which Children Are ‘Gifted’ Won’t Go Away appeared first on American Renaissance.