New York City’s Gifted Problem
For months, the New York Post warned its readers that the city’s next mayor was coming for the schools. “Zohran Mamdani just escalated his war on excellence in NYC public schools,” the Post’s editorial board declared in October, as the mayoral race was entering its final weeks. Three days later, another Post headline: “Zohran Mamdani’s callous school plan steals hope from NYC’s brightest kids.” To mark his inauguration, on New Year’s Day, the editorial board weighed in again, with “Mamdani’s pick for schools boss spells disaster for city kids.” So far, Mamdani has cheerfully brushed aside these cartoon-villain allegations, announcing an ambitious universal-child-care plan and holding an adorable press conference with constituents in the under-five demographic.
Despite the Post’s tone of sweeping condemnation, each of these editorials was tunnelling in on a tentative and arguably rather niche item on Mamdani’s campaign agenda: ending gifted-and-talented admissions for rising kindergarten students. Mamdani appeared to affirm his campaign stance on G. & T. with his choice for schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels. As a superintendent in Brooklyn, Samuels phased out some gifted tracking in the district he oversaw, citing disproportionately high numbers of affluent white and Asian students in G. & T., and similarly lopsided numbers of Black and brown students in general-education classes. “This administration does not believe in G. & T. evaluation for kindergartners,” a spokesperson for Mamdani told me. “But that’s not the same as eliminating advanced opportunities across all grades.” The other main entry point into G. & T. is in third grade, and Mamdani has no plans to end that option. Nor has he said when he would actually close the lid on G.& T. for kindergartners; the program will remain in place at least through the 2026-27 school year.
Mamdani would be the fourth consecutive New York mayor to implement major changes to G. & T., which offers accelerated and enriched curricula to qualifying children. Until the mid-two-thousands, a patchwork of G. & T. programs operated all over the city, with widely differing admission criteria. Then, under Michael Bloomberg, the city introduced standardized criteria for G. & T. admissions: exams, administered in testing centers to four- and five-year-olds. A child who landed in a percentile in the high nineties might secure an extremely coveted seat at one of five citywide G. & T. schools. A result in the mere low-to-mid-nineties might qualify a student for one of the more numerous district-level G. & T. programs, which are housed in regular schools. A seat in G. & T. can put a kid on track for admission to New York’s equally coveted specialized high schools and, by extension, to the nation’s élite colleges and universities. But there were always more eligible kids than seats, and final placements were mostly determined by lottery.
Near the end of Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty, in 2021, he announced plans to sunset existing gifted-and-talented tracks, owing to persistent criticism that the programs reinforce inequality and racial segregation. During the 2018-19 school year, for example, Black and Latino kids made up sixty-three per cent of the over-all kindergarten class, but only sixteen per cent of G. & T. students. Kids in this underrepresented cohort were less likely to take the G. & T. exam than their white and Asian peers, and their families were less likely to accept a seat if one was offered. (At the same time, research shows that Black and brown students who do enroll in New York City’s G. & T. programs also make some of the largest academic gains.) The G. & T. class itself represented just 2.4 per cent of all kindergartners that year—but G. & T.’s low share of students has never matched its outsized effects on public-education discourse.
Eric Adams, entering office at the beginning of 2022, quickly reversed de Blasio’s decision to end G. & T. admissions for kindergartners, and even added some seats. Most consequentially, Adams, in a bid to improve equity, permanently scrapped the high-stakes qualifying exam in favor of the current, somewhat free-for-all process in which pre-K teachers can nominate an unlimited number of their students, who are then entered into a (now larger) lottery. But representation of Black and Latino kindergartners in G. & T. has inched up only modestly under the new system, and parents and educators have questioned whether a more subjective nomination process returns fairer results than a standardized test.
G. & T. admissions have always hinged somewhat on luck and happenstance: the happenstance of birth and environment, of the mood a four-year-old was in on the morning of a high-stakes test. The exam model for G. & T. was never popular—in fact, it was likely the only one of its kind in the country—and even the kids who aced the test could end up drawing the short straw in admissions. Under Adams, however, G. & T. increasingly resembled a citywide raffle. If Mamdani ends G. & T. for the youngest kids, it may be an acknowledgement that a lottery can’t evaluate whether a child might benefit from an accelerated curriculum. What it can do is divide its young participants into a small group of winners and a much bigger group of losers.
New York’s many iterations of G. & T. have traditionally carried the aura of the golden ticket; the G. & T.-hopeful parent might be forgiven for imagining her child to be a Charlie Bucket in a world of Veruca Salts. Allison Roda, an associate professor of education at Molloy University, sees the city’s gifted-and-talented programs as exemplary of “a zero-sum mind-set,” in which parents in an underfunded, overcrowded public system are compelled to compete against one another for scarce resources. Who gets in, Roda told me, mainly “reflects parents’ advantages and knowledge of the system.” When G. & T. admissions were decided by exam, parents who wanted a spot for their child could invest in expensive test prep; under the current system, they can inveigle preschool teachers for recommendations. Roda has interviewed hundreds of G. & T. parents over the years, many of whom, she said, “will acknowledge that they wouldn’t even call their kids gifted.”
When the field of gifted education was first coalescing, in the early twentieth century, it was mostly oriented toward children whom anyone would call gifted: your Mozarts and Doogie Howsers, your Little Men Tate. They were not merely bright and precocious but true outliers who, not unlike kids with dyslexia or other learning differences, needed a tailored curriculum and classroom setting in order to thrive. Troublingly, many of the early psychologists and educators who took the lead on studying and developing curricula for these children were steeped in eugenics, including the belief in intelligence as hereditary, race- and class-dependent, and largely fixed. For these thinkers—including Lewis Terman, who developed the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale—an exclusive gifted classroom logically doubled as a tool of racial and socioeconomic segregation.
In the mid-nineteen-thirties, the New York City Board of Education and Teachers College at Columbia University launched a five-year program in Harlem known as the Speyer School experiment, which, as a Board of Education representative later explained, was intended “to determine a desirable program of education for intellectual deviates.” There, kids who had earned either lower-than-average or exceptionally high scores on the Stanford-Binet test were divided into groups of “slow” and “rapid” learners.
The Speyer experiment wound down in 1941; one of its unofficial successors was Hunter College Elementary School, in Manhattan, founded as “an experimental and demonstration center for intellectually gifted pupils.” Prospective kindergartners at Hunter must score off the charts on a modified I.Q. test just to get past the first round of the admissions process, which is, as the Times once wrote, “probably one of the most competitive in the world.” A Daily News piece from 1988 reported on the dilemma of “middle-class parents trying to make it in Manhattan” whose kids weren’t admitted to Hunter, despite I.Q. scores in the top one per cent. Many of these disappointed parents enrolled their children in private schools; others likely decamped to the suburbs. But a few instead began recruiting and fund-raising for what became one of the five ultra-élite citywide G. & T. programs, at the Anderson School on the Upper West Side. (Even today, Anderson is regarded among G. & T.-savvy parents in Manhattan as an exceptionally prestigious consolation prize, the Yale to Hunter’s Harvard.)
It’s easy to caricature some G. & T.-curious parents as grasping, status-obsessed, or slightly deluded about their child’s special brand of specialness. But research shows that the kinds of kids who might just miss a shot at Hunter or Anderson—not necessarily geniuses or savants, just very bright, driven, academically oriented kids—are likely to become inattentive, frustrated, or disruptive in a gen-ed classroom, with possible long-term effects on their academic performance and social-emotional development. Karen Rambo-Hernandez, a professor of education at Texas A. & M., told me that students suffer “when they show they need the challenge and are not challenged. They need opportunities to fail and learn from failure. They need the chance to say, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s an edge to what I know.’ ” These students, Michael Matthews, an education professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, told me, “keep sailing through school without having to do much of anything—until all of a sudden they do, and then they don’t know how to respond.”
Gifted-class sizes are not necessarily smaller than their gen-ed counterparts, but they can feel that way because students’ level of academic attainment is more homogeneous. “In your typical neighborhood school, a fifth-grade classroom has everything from kids who can’t read at all to kids who are reading at a high-school or almost college level,” Matthews said. “Asking a teacher to meet the learning needs of all those kids is an impossible order. What tends to happen is that the teacher focusses on the kids who need the most help. They figure that the ones who are achieving above grade level will be O.K. on their own, and we know that’s not the case.”
A precocious kid who is bored in a gen-ed classroom might need gifted education, but decades of data and research suggest it’s more likely that he and everyone else simply need fewer classmates, so that his teacher can give each student more individualized attention. Even Mamdani, who has not made K-12 education a focus of his campaign or early mayoralty, lamented “crowded classrooms” in his inaugural address. In 2022, Governor Kathy Hochul signed a law requiring public schools in New York City to limit classroom sizes to between twenty and twenty-five students by 2028. But funding, construction, and teacher hiring may be lagging behind the goal. As of last year, according to reporting by Chalkbeat New York, the city had reached its legally mandated benchmark only by juking the stats: more than ten thousand classrooms had been temporarily exempted from the law, including in schools that did not request the exemptions.
Gifted-education scholars point out that there is no standard definition of giftedness. (I.Q. tests, for one, are no longer seen as a flawlessly scientific measure of intelligence, as they were when the field of gifted education was emerging.) Nor is there a standardized curriculum for gifted students. “The whole notion has been thrown into some question in terms of solidity and coherence as a construct,” James Borland, a professor at Teachers College, at Columbia, told me. Without a firm definition of terms, Borland went on, educators are ill-equipped to address the central question of “what should these kids be doing in school that we can ethically and otherwise agree is worth their time, but not worth the time of other kids.”
Borland was disappointed, he said, that moving away from the test and toward teacher recommendations for G. & T. admissions “doesn’t seem to have made a difference in terms of the equity questions that these classes raise.” These questions go back decades. According to reporting by New York magazine, among the inaugural cohort of students at the citywide gifted school NEST+m, which opened in 2001, on the Lower East Side, one grade was divided, shockingly, into an “A-class” of five kids, “most of them white,” and a “B-class” of about twenty kids, “nearly all of them Hispanic or black.” Asian representation greatly increased in G. & T. programs over time, but representation of other communities of color did not keep the same pace.
In gen-ed schools that reserve space for gifted programs, the demographic divide between the children filing into one classroom versus another can be stark. “You can also see it in terms of, like, the gifted classroom has a printer and a fancy rug and an air-conditioner, and the gen-ed class doesn’t,” Roda said, adding that G. & T. parents sometimes do their own fund-raising—money which is then siloed from the rest of the school.
These discrepancies illustrate how a field of education with roots in eugenics, that developed on behalf of a small number of prodigies and brainiacs, became, in effect, a way to keep a critical mass of well-resourced families and their kids from leaving New York’s often chaotic and threadbare schools. A 1979 New York magazine cover story speculated that some districts prioritize G. & T. “if for no other reason than to offer a lure to the white middle class.” Nearly a half century later, the doomsaying Post put it only somewhat differently, declaring that the end of early G. & T. under Mamdani would contribute to “the emptying of classrooms, as parents continue to jump ship on the city’s failing public school system.” A parent advocate for gifted programs, Yiatin Chu, told the Times that, in signalling a lack of support for early G. & T., Mamdani had stepped into “a hornet’s nest.”
Enrollment in New York City’s system—the largest by far in the nation—has indeed plunged since the COVID-19 pandemic, from just over a million students in the 2019-20 school year to about eight hundred and eighty-four thousand in the fall. But those trends have little connection to G. & T., and much more to do with the affordability crisis driving young families out of the city, and with disillusionment in the city’s public schools that arose from COVID-era closures and remote learning. Seen in this context, G. & T. seems symbolic of a larger malaise, and of a scarcity mind-set. How badly parents want it reflects how poorly they regard the rest of the system. How much attention we pay to G. & T.—at the expense of the vast majority of students G. & T. doesn’t touch—might be, in itself, an equity issue.
In a practical sense, “gifted and talented” is perhaps less an honorific or a diagnosis than an escape hatch, or the passcode that unlocks a magic door. The application of the term arguably signifies less about a child than a system. “I think we should forget about labelling kids as gifted,” Borland told me. “It’s become meaningless. Our field has been existential rather than educational, in that we ask the question, Is this child gifted? That’s the wrong question. We should be asking, What does this child need?” ♦