New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani is dividing education advocates with his calls to axe a gifted program in schools.
Gifted programs have little standard regulation, but their defenders argue they are a necessity for children who are ahead of their grade level, while opponents voice equity concerns.
New York City Public Schools have an early gifted program that starts in kindergarten and includes approximately 5 percent the district’s student population. Mamdani, who leads polls ahead of the election next month, is the only candidate to propose ending the program, according to questionnaires given to the candidates by The New York Times.
A separate gifted program in the city starts at third grade, a more common age group for the process nationwide.
“Zohran knows that five year-olds should not be subjected to a singular assessment that unfairly separates them right at the beginning of their public school education. His agenda for our schools will ensure that every New York City public school student receives a high-quality early education that enables them to be challenged and fulfilled,” campaign spokesperson Dora Pekec said.
Experts’ concerns with gifted programs, particularly for those at such a young age, often center around issues of access and screening, which, lacking federal standards, vary from state to state. Access can be based on teacher recommendation or certain test scores, including some exams that are only given off-campus.
“One of the central concerns with gifted education, in particular with the younger ages, are considerations for which students are going to be able to be identified as gifted. This is a clear concern when the system has an opt-in policy, where it might require families to sign up for some like outside assessment to be identified as gifted, and not all families might have the resources or the knowledge to do that,” said Christopher Cleveland, assistant professor of education and education policy at Brown University.
Even recommendations for universal screening come with their own concerns.
“Some of the debates there are about using sort of standardized test scores or sort of standardized assessments to help assess which students are performing at a higher level, and that has those concerns about whether you’re capturing the student skill or the teaching quality that they perceived,” Cleveland said.
States are allowed to create their own definition for gifted students, but the federal one under the Every Student Succeeds Act says such pupils “give evidence of high achievement capability in such areas as intellectual, creative, artistic, or leadership capacity, or in specific academic fields, and who need services or activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop those capabilities.”
In a 2022-23 report, the National Association for Gifted Children found services for gifted students, even as young as kindergarten, commonly include accelerated coursework or honors classes or being pulled out of classrooms at certain times of the day for advanced instruction.
While exact numbers are hard to pin down for national gifted program attendance due to different reporting requirements, about 3 million students are estimated to attend gifted programs, and they are more likely to be wealthy and white.
Advocates for the programs say expanding opportunities and ensuring a holistic evaluation is critical for ensuring no group is left behind.
“We’ve had stories of students who didn’t really understand the impact of the assessment, so they decided it was more busy work and they just blew through it, and maybe it didn’t reflect their best abilities. And so, that’s why we always look at all applications holistically, because we know testing is just a snapshot,” said Megan Cannella, the Davidson Institute’s director of outreach.
Others argue earlier starts to gifted programs could actually help alleviate disparities between groups.
Del Siegle, director of the National Center for Research on Gifted Education at the University of Connecticut, told The Hill that waiting until third grade to be tested into a gifted program could leave students stuck at a grade level they don’t belong for years beforehand.
“When we look at teachers’ rating kids for identification into gifted services, we’re not finding a bias there. So that’s really kind of good news. But a lot of these kids come to school without having some of the advantages that other kids have had, and so, they’re playing catch-up from Day 1,” Siegle said, adding learning can slow down among gifted students if they aren’t challenged early.
“A lot of times, gifted education gets blamed for this problem. But the problem exists at the first day of school, and if educators could do a better job of getting these kids up to speed, then I don’t think we would have this disproportionality,” he added. “It’s kind of a double whammy for a kid in poverty. So, if there’s no gifted program to develop their talents, they get overlooked when there is a gifted program.”
The move has lost Mamdani the endorsement of Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education (PLACE) NYC, which argues that while the program should be expanded to include more students, it is a net benefit to the city’s students.
“Having a curriculum that is only just one size fits all is very misguided, because what happens, and what has been shown in studies, is that kids who are accelerated become very bored, and then they check out, they stop engaging, they become disruptive,” said Lisa Marks, co-president of PLACE NYC.
“They have behavioral issues in the class, and that actually is detrimental, not to just themselves, but to the whole class when they’re trying to learn a lesson,” she added.