Unit 5.

Education policy
The dignity of all the talents

NEW YORK
A battle over educating gifted children is brewing in America

Stuyvesant high school is considered the crown jewel of the public schools in New York City. The
magnet school is one of America’s biggest feeders to Harvard; a list of alumni includes four Nobel
laureates. It is also one of New York’s most competitive schools, admitting pupils on the basis of a
single, high-stakes exam and little else. To some, that seems the meritocratic ideal. To others, it
yields alarming results. Asian- Americans do far better in the entrance exam and are 73% of the
school population— or four times their share of the pupil population in the district.
The debate over whether education of gifted children segregates them on the basis of pre-existing
privilege rather than cognitive ability is neither new nor uniquely American. The number of selective,
state-run grammar schools in Britain reached its zenith in 1965, before the Labour government of
Harold Wilson embarked on a largely successful effort “to eliminate separatism in secondary
education”. The three-tiered German education system—which sorts children on the basis of ability
at the age of ten into either university- preparatory schools or vocational ones—has always been
criticised for fostering social segregation. The fact that the children of Turkish migrants are now
disproportionately sorted into lower-tier secondary schools instead of selective Gymnasien adds a
disquieting racial divide.
In America the debate is kicking up anew. Much of that is due to Bill de Blasio, the city’s left-
wing mayor, who has staked his administration (and recently imploded presidential run) on the
promise of reducing inequality. In August a panel he convened, called the School Diversity Advisory
Group, proposed a sweeping reform to “move away from unjust gifted and talented programmes and
school screens”— eliminating them entirely. Though the policy has not yet been implemented, it
triggered a furore among parents, particularly Asian-Americans, fearful that their children’s chance
of a fine education was to be sacrificed on the altar of diversity.
Emotions run high because the quality of education in New York City, as with most other aspects
of life there, is so uneven. There are schools with perfect graduation rates and some where more than
30% of pupils drop out. An astonishing 40% of high schools in the city do not teach chemistry,
physics or upper-level algebra, notes Clara Hemphill, the founding editor of InsideSchools, an
education-policy website. “The problem is not learning linear algebra in schools, but not knowing
arithmetic.”
Choice beyond a possibly poor neighbourhood public school is constrained both by geography
and by financing. New York has exceptionally good private schools, available at exceptionally high
prices. Horace Mann School in the Bronx costs $53,200 a year, from pre-kindergarten to 12th grade.
Charter schools, publicly funded but privately run, provide choices for the masses. Often they draw
poorer pupils from local schools. Some of the city’s highest-performing charter schools, such as
Success Academy, draw bids from the ranks of middle-class parents as well.
Anxiety and resentment are rife. The programmes for gifted children offered by the city foster
extreme competition both because they give some reassurance of a free, high-quality education and
because space is extremely limited. Only 6% of high-school pupils attend one of the eight sought-
after specialised high schools. Because admissions are based on high-stakes tests, concerned families
spend big sums on test preparation—which then makes the process less egalitarian than intended.
Tutoring centres in the city sell one-on-one preparation for $200 an hour or more.
Some advocates yearn for an egalitarian model like Finland’s—where comprehensive schools and
a focus on special education (or disabilities) rather than giftedness coincide with high rankings on
international measures such as pisa scores. But even in Finland, more than 10% of uppersecondary
schools (those before university) are specialised. Other attributes, such as high education spending
and extreme selectivity of applicants to become teachers (only 10% make it), are probably also
critical to the education system’s success. Removing programmes for the gifted will not suddenly
turn New York into Finland.
No doubt the system in America could be improved. It seems unlikely that gifted children can
reliably be spotted at the age of four on the basis of a standardised test (as is now the norm). More
places would help de-escalate the test-prep arms race. So too would giving the screening test to all
pupils, rather than just to those who opt in. Implementation of such a policy in Broward County,
Florida—the sixth-largest public-school system in the country—doubled the number of Hispanic and
black children in programmes for the gifted.
Mr de Blasio floated the idea of scrapping the entrance test and admitting the top 7% of students
from each middle school (roughly, for pupils aged 11 to 14) to specialised schools. One problem is
that at some middle schools this would include students who had not passed the state maths exam.
This infuriated many Asian parents, who do not see why their children should be punished for
studying hard.
Children from poor homes have problems that need to be tackled long before they reach high
school. A good education system should be as capable of deliveringremedial instruction as education
for the gifted—and herein lies the problem. Segregating pupils in schools of high poverty, with few
additional resources, is a recipe for stagnation. The aim of integration should be to eliminate such
schools, but perhaps not to dismantle upper-tier courses. The fear that this might trigger white or
middle-class flight from public schools may be overblown. Parents in Park Slope, a mostly well-to-
do neighbourhood in Brooklyn, proposed an integration plan for middle schools which went into
effect last year. The share of white children in the schools did not drop at all.