City shocked that children from South Bronx fail to qualify for gifted programs like children from Upper West Side
The NY Times reports,
Some thought that offering standardized tests was “a crucial step in a prolonged effort to equalize access to programs that critics complained were dominated by white middle-class children whose parents knew how to navigate the system,”
But in fact,
under the new policy, children from the city’s poorest districts were offered a smaller percentage than last year of the entry-grade gifted slots in elementary schools. Children in the city’s wealthiest districts captured a greater share of the slots.
Now, granted…if we were comparing a disparity between rich whites to poor whites, we would not be shocked. But here, where the underclass is overwhelmingly a different race, well…we simply cannot tolerate this!
“the administration is intent on ensuring equal access to the system’s most coveted offerings and closing the racial achievement gap, which Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein frequently refers to as a critical front in the civil rights battle.”
The NY Times notes,
School districts nationwide are struggling to make gifted programs more racially and economically diverse.
And to think this is even a problem in Jew York City….
Which community’s kids do you think are going to be passed over for the gifted programs for the sake of racial diversity? And don’t kid yourselves…important rich Jews who send their own kids to private schools will be all too willing to rig the schools against middle class Jews in order to prove how progressive they are, and even the majority who won’t support such measures will refrain from fighting them in any significant way.
3 comments
Money doesn’t make kids “gifted”, equality of outcome and / or input doesn’t make kids “gifted”. “Gifted” children, unless they are savants, often are deprived of a proper childhood in order to make up for their parents’ shortcomings. Over here, many a kid with learning disabilities and behavioural disorders has been determined “gifted, yet misunderstood” - typically the parents are upper middle class (parents of “lower” social background usually are less reluctant to sending their kids to special schools) and fail to grasp the concept that the huge majority of kids is simply just kids. As I’ve stated before in another thread of yours, extraordinarily intelligent kids are intelligent enough to understand that being noisy will disturb their classmates and will find a silent way of entertaining themselves even when they’ve completed a task faster than the others - even their bottom-of-class peers get it - so people shouldn’t be fooled by labels. Also, “giftedness” is generally determined by psychologists (which anybody may call themselves BTW in contrast to psychiatrists), and I remember my psychology professors from university being nothing but wary of psychologists and / or private teachers parents pay for - afterall, the customer is always right.
This story makes me… ugh.
I remember my psychology professors from university being nothing but wary of psychologists and / or private teachers parents pay for - after all, the customer is always right.
Sarah, I’m not sure I that I agree with the rest of what you’re saying - but that is the truest statement ever made about the psychiatric profession.
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