Gifted students have to check theiš·r privilege and get over themselves.
It doesnāt matter whether they are minorities. It doesnāt matter whether they were brought to the United States as children. It doesnāt matter how poor their families may be. It doesnāt matter if šthey havą¶£e inspiring personal stories. It doesnāt matter how hard they work.
No, the very fact that they are getting accommodated in classrooms and programs that donāt necessarily represent thše demographic make-up of their school districts at large means that they need to be brought šÆdown a notch.
If there were any doubt that āequityā is now the most destructive concept in American life, the war on gifted and talented programs all around the country, from California (on the verge of eliminating ź§tracking in math through the 10th grade), to Seattle (which eliminated its honors program for middle-schools students), to suburban Philadelphia (where a district is stopping tracking for middle-school students and limiting it for high-school students), removes all doubt.
New York City has been a major battleground for the anti-gifted agenda that runs under the banner of desegregation, as if the offense of the George Wallaces of the world is no longer blocking the scāhoolhouse door, but teaching exceptź§ionally talented students at an accelerated pace.
Mayor de Blasio just moved to significantly crimp the cityās gifted progšrams, disproportionately utilized by white and Asian-American kids, in a sop to racialist bean-counters. As The New York Times notes, the mayor has been ācriticized for not taking forceful action to fulfill his promise of tackling inequality in public schools.šā
Not that he hasnāt tried. Earlier in his administration, he appointed a panel that recommended eliminating almost all of the cityās selective programs, alleš±ging that they are āproxies for separating students who can and should have opportunities to learn together.ā
He attempted to ax the exclusive admissions exam for the city top high schools, which the Left hates for having the āwrongā demographics. The schools chancellor at the time, Richard Carranza, slammed āthe narrative that any one ethnic group šowns admission to these schools,ā i.e., in his perverted view, Asian-American kids were unfairly achieving beyond their numbers.
Outraged parents defeated the plan. De Blasio then eliminated some aādmissions requirements at the cityās competitive middle and high schools. Now, heās re-engineering the cityās approach to gifted students more broadly.
De Blasio wants to end an exam to identify gifted kids among rising kindergartners. Instead, he would spend tens of million of dollars to train all the cityās kindergarten teachers to fulfill the needs of giāfted students in their classrooms. A new admissions process would use classwork and teacher evaluations to find students among rising third-graders who need accelerated instruction and give it to students a period or two a day.
New York Cityās kindergarten test is open to legitimate criticism. By all means, school districts should take steps to ensure they are identifyišng gifted students from all sorts of backgrounds.
But ending dedicated classes for the gifted and insisting on classrooms with students of widely varying šødegrees of preparedness and ability isnāt doing teachers, oź¦ær anyone else, any favors.
The equality that matters is equality of opportunity toward the end of maximizing everyoneās achievement, whether that means acceš“lerating one studentās instruction such that he or she is ready to go to college at age 16 or going at the pace appropriate to a kid who will have trouble earning a high-school diploma.
All of these kids are of equal worth and dignity. That doesnāt mean, though, that š ·they should be in the same classroom taught the same materials on the same timetable.
Anyone who knows anything about how the world works realizes that all of us have different aptiź§ tudes. That some kids are going to learn faster than others isnāt a scandal, itās a function of a phenomenon that progressives are supposed to value ā diversity.
Twitter: @RichLowry