GIFTED AND TALENTED PROGRAM SERIES

The school board disseminated our proposal district-wide, scheduled a special board meeting to discuss it, and invited the entire district parent community. Our new entry proposal also called for the development of a more multifaceted definition of giftedness. Rather than testing, we proposed entry criteria based on observation of kindergarten students by our district’s kindergarten teachers, who would nominate student applicants based on their demonstrated capacities. Rather than starting the gifted program in kindergarten and testing four-year-olds in the prior year, we suggested beginning the gifted program in first grade. These objections, combined with the roiling tensions generated by an overwhelmingly White group of children bussed to and sequestered into separate tracks in predominantly Black and Latinx elementary schools, led our school board to propose a revision of our entry policy. Skeptics argued that because our district tested only a narrow range of primarily verbal skills, we were privileging a sliver of the broad range of capacities associated with giftedness. While some evinced highly refined art, music and other aesthetic abilities, still others showed very advanced kinesthetic skills. Some child prodigies demonstrated highly developed verbal and memory skills others showed striking facility with numbers and calculation. What we were actually assessing, our detractors claimed, was young children’s level of familiarity with the reigning cultural milieu in which test-makers and applicants alike were immersed.Īlthough child prodigies had long established an enviable educational legacy-consider the young Mozart or the young Thelonius Monk-the nature of their giftedness varied enormously. Our testing instruments, critics argued, were not only age-inappropriate but also inevitably structured by cultural bias and familial advantage. Since the inception of the Astor program, early childhood experts had challenged the validity not only of the entry tests, but the reliability of any assessment of four-year-olds developed to determine the nature and extent of their giftedness. Worse, the entry testing abuses masked a deeper problem, the validity of the testing itself. When the district discovered anomalies in the scores of some of the students privately tested, the school board decided that all testing for gifted program entry would be conducted by the district’s own psychologists. Our district’s psychologists administered the required tests, but parents could opt for private testing if they chose to pay the fee.

GIFTED AND TALENTED PROGRAM SERIES

The first issue I faced as a new school board member was a series of alleged abuses of the gifted program’s entry testing. Essentially our district’s gifted programs represented an early version of choice at the elementary school level. Thus, the gifted program’s students were bussed from their home neighborhoods to the three elementary schools housing the gifted tracks.

Although the district’s zoned elementary schools enrolled their students from contiguous neighborhoods, the three gifted programs recruited students from the entire district. Yet enrollment in the district’s three gifted programs was overwhelmingly White. In 1983 District 15’s 20,000 student population was predominantly Latinx and White, with smaller segments of Black and Asian. I soon realized that middle class meant white students and their parents. An administrator who helped start our district’s gifted program told me that, in his view, the Astor program was designed to keep the middle class in the city’s public school system. These gifted programs began in kindergarten, with entry based on early childhood aptitude tests administered to pre-kindergarten applicants. In 1983, after I was elected to the Community School Board in Brooklyn’s District 15, I learned that our district had developed Astor program gifted tracks-one class to each grade-in three elementary schools. In 1973, the Vincent Astor Foundation-funded New York City to initiate programs for gifted students in 40 Manhattan and Brooklyn schools.

Gifted and talented program