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Seattle Public Schools is dismantling its gifted and talented program, which administrators argued was oversaturated with white and Asian students, in favor of a more “inclusive, equitable and culturally sensitive” program. The district began phasing out its Highly Capable Cohort schools and classrooms for advanced students in the 2021-22 school year due to racial inequities, the school district notes. The program will completely cease to exist by the 2027-28 school year, with a new enrichment-for-all model available in every school by the 2024-25 school year. “The program is not going away, it’s getting better,” school officials said on the district...

A battle is brewing in the Baltimore County School District in Maryland this month and it should serve as yet another reason to keep an eye on what your local school boards are up to. They are currently working on the district’s budget for fiscal year 2024 and parents have noticed some significant cuts to the gifted and talented students program. The proposed budget would not end the program entirely, but it would eliminate three of the four teaching positions currently assigned to the program. Parents have pointed out that students who qualify for the program enhance their chances of...

NEW YORK — Communities across the United States are reconsidering their approach to gifted and talented programs in schools as vocal parents blame such elite programs for worsening racial segregation and inequities in the country’s education system. A plan announced by New York City’s mayor to phase out elementary school gifted and talented programs in the country’s largest school district — if it proceeds — would be among the most significant developments yet in a push that extends from Boston to Seattle and that has stoked passions and pain over race, inequality and access to a decent education. From the...

As his two terms as New York's mayor approach their end, and long after his presidential campaign ended with a whimper, Bill de Blasio has chimed in with one last act of destruction: a proposal to end the public schools' entry-by-exam gifted and talented program for first graders. De Blasio's gripe is that selection by tests results in a student body that is, as New York Times reporter Eliza Shapiro slyly put it, "widely criticized for exacerbating segregation." Of course what de Blasio, Shapiro and the anonymous critics she repeatedly references are complaining about is not actually segregation, which means...

Can you spell “soft bigotry of low expectations”?The never-ending battle over New York City’s advanced school programs continues. A top NYC school in June canceled plans to scrap accelerated math classes, following an outcry from enraged parents. Yet, after years of debate, city officials on Thursday announced they will eliminate an advanced program for four-year-olds before they enter kindergarten, claiming the program “further segregates students.”City officials say the new program will allow all kindergarteners to have access to accelerated learning.As reported by ABC7 in NYC, hapless Mayor Bill de Blasio claims the replacement program, named Brilliant NYC, will provide an...

As has been telegraphed for years now, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on his way out of office has announced the wind-down of his school system's Gifted and Talented program. The move is more symbolic than seismic—in a K-12 system with an estimated (though obfuscated) 900,000 or so students, only around 2,000 kindergartners will be materially affected by the change next fall, and the likely incoming mayor, Eric Adams, has said that he prefers expanding, not euthanizing, the G&T program. Basing any large educational fork in the road on a 4-year-old taking a test has always struck me...

Mayor Bill de Blasio is phasing out New York City’s Gifted and Talented program, he announced Friday — bowing to critics who complain that the coveted model is racist. Current students in the program will be able to stay in accelerated-learning classes to completion. But new cohorts they will be completely eliminated by fall 2022, ending the current testing for 4-year-old city kids. “The era of judging four-year-olds based on a single test is over,” de Blasio said Friday. It is being replaced by Brilliant NYC, a program offering students aged 8 and up chances for accelerated learning — while...

A man scales the all-glass facade of Trump Tower, Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2016, in New York. A police spokeswoman says officers responded to Donald Trump's namesake skyscraper on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The 58-story building is headquarters to the Republican presidential nominee's campaign. He also lives there. NEW YORK (AP) — A man who said he was seeking “a private audience” with Donald Trump by climbing the Republican presidential candidate’s skyscraper was hospitalized on Thursday after his arrest a day earlier on charges of reckless endangerment and trespassing. The New York Police Department identified the climber as 19-year-old Stephen Rogata,...

In a recent paper, Lubinski and his colleagues caught up with one cohort of 320 people now in their late 30s. At 12, their SAT math or verbal scores had placed them among the top one-100th of 1 percent. Today, many are CEOs, professors at top research universities, transplant surgeons, and successful novelists. That outcome sounds like exactly what you’d imagine should happen: Top young people grow into high-achieving adults. In the education world, the study has provided important new evidence that it really is possible to identify the kids who are likely to become exceptional achievers in the future,...

A popular gifted-student program at a New York City elementary school is getting the ax after school officials decided it lacked diversity. PS 139 Principal Mary McDonald told parents in a letter Jan. 24 that Students of Academic Rigor, or SOAR, would no longer accept applications for incoming kindergartners, the New York Daily Newsreported. “Our Kindergarten classes will be heterogeneously grouped to reflect the diversity of our student body and the community we live in,” Miss McDonald said in the letter posted on Flickr.com. At least one parent described SOAR as largely white, while others disagreed, the report said. One...

Imagine that the CIA uncovered a Chinese plot to attack the American economy by undermining our educational system, specifically by making sure that we no longer cultivated the smartest of the smart? The response would be outrage, and rightly so. Some might even call it an act of war, far worse than the usual cyber attack. Alas, what our foreign enemies dare not attempt, we inflict on ourselves. This is a war on gifted education, killing off the intellectually demanding programs targeting the top 3 or 5% of our national brainpower. This war is a barely noticed guerilla war, one...

Ian McKeachie is a freckled 15-year-old who "drifted along" in elementary school. Not because he didn't love to learn or because it wasn't a good school, but because he mastered new concepts so quickly that the classroom work presented no challenge. "My teachers would usually use me as a tutor for the other kids," he says, "so I was engaged in school, just not in a way that had me learning."

Intelligence tests are as much a measure of motivation as they are of mental ability, says research from the US.Researchers from Pennsylvania found that a high IQ score required both high intelligence and high motivation but a low IQ score could be the result of a lack of either factor. Incentives were also found to increase IQ scores by a noticeable margin. The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Firstly, it analysed previous studies of how material incentives affected the performance of more than 2,000 people in intelligence tests. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania,...

Obama Visits School for the GiftedObama recently took a tour of the Obama School for the Gifted where the Dean, Mrs. Chandler, met him at the entrance. Mrs. Chandler began by showing Obama a row of rooms on the left side of the complex. She explained, "These are all private. In each room a student takes tests of different subjects and the results of the tests they fail are kept sealed." Obama replied, "That's like what happened during my university days." He joked, "That's also why no one will ever have any copies of my records." Mrs. Chandler looked at...

The city will search for a new admissions test for its gifted and talented public school programs, a Department of Education official said on Monday, in part to address concerns that some families were “gaming” the test through extensive preparation. The official, Marc Sternberg, the new deputy chancellor for portfolio planning, said the change could occur for the 2012-13 year. The city has one more year in its current testing contract. Mr. Sternberg announced the move at a City Council hearing on education, after extensive questioning from council members about why the city’s gifted programs were not as racially and...

What’s happening to the boy genius? Outside of fantasy fiction, he seems to be a shrinking breed. New York’s gifted-and-talented schools are overstocked with girls, a recent Times study found. In some gifted classrooms, three-fifths of the students are female. Yes, we know girls are smart and dutiful and hardworking, but this phenomenon confounds what’s long been considered the natural order. Could it really be that boys are now the struggling class, in need of help or affirmative action? Experts have been warning about the boy crisis for years, but the idea has never really taken hold—partly because it originated...

As California's public schools have increasingly poured attention and resources into the state's struggling students, high academic learners - the so-called gifted students - have been getting the short shrift, a policy decision that some worry could leave the United States at a competitive disadvantage. Critics see courses tailored for exceptional students as elitist and not much of an issue when compared with the vast number of students who are lagging grades behind their peers or dropping out of school. But a growing chorus of parents and advocates is asking the contentious question: What about the smart kids? "We have...

One of the other school districts that I worked in has a gifted and talented program that I thought would interest some of my readers because it shows how possible and how extensive the liberal agenda can stretch into the government-run schools in our country. In some schools, gifted and talented programs for students may offer increased enrichment opportunities, ask students to take more leadership on important issues, hold seminars to improve critical thinking skills, or include visits to local museums. But in other schools, just the the program that I observed in a local middle school, the gifted and...

BOISE, Idaho – Every high school has at least a handful of them, gifted students who blow through Faulkner as if it were a comic book, teenagers who catch on to calculus as if it were checkers. These students are often just marking time in high school and typically become bored and withdrawn as they long for a bigger academic challenge. States are responding to the problem by making it easier for gifted students to head off to college sooner. Idaho lawmakers have proposed giving scholarships to high school students who enroll in college early. Eight other states are participating...

The national academy for gifted and talented pupils, a central element in Tony Blair's drive to make state schools attractive to middle class parents, is to be scrapped next month. Since it was created in 2002, the academy has provided support, master classes and summer schools for more than 200,000 children and training for thousands of teachers in how to identify and support able pupils. The U-turn will see much of the academy's £20 million funding targeted instead on deprived teenagers as part of the Government's bid to improve social mobility and get more poor students into top universities. Critics...