New York City is awash in children who would benefit from advanced education. But there's one big problem—scarcity—and nowhere is that scarcity worse than in middle school.
Time for NY to follow LAUSD’s lead and offer more. All students are screened, with guardian permission in 2nd grade, students can enter gifted tracked/accelerated tracks with high test scores or through arts identifications or highly gifted pathways. Low income children get an automatic points boost. There are full gifted magnet programs (not enough slots) but also many high quality local programs that students can enter as well as a few test based programs. Students can access *four* levels of middle school math and schools are *delighted* with them to and happy to have these high performing/lower stress kids from other schools enter.
As a parent of elementary-school G&Ters, I'm turned off this article by the way it uncritically presents the voice of Yiatin Chu without mentioning her relationship to pro-segregation and anti-LGBT group P.L.A.C.E. and treats her as "just another parent" instead of someone trying to weaponize granular school issues in service of a right-wing culture-war agenda.
Why are there not seats for all who qualify? I am a retired gifted program director who continually wrote grants to qualify non trained teachers to be trained to teach gifted students at each one’s level. I’m sorry, there’s no excuse for this …. Especially when we have an over abundance of special ed teachers in MS, elementary and HS…. Is there criteria to prove special education teachers are making a difference for these children? There are criteria for gifted ed!
I have asked the Department of Ed the following question repeatedly, "If you believe that G&T students require different programming that those who don't, then how can you justify not offering a seat to everyone who qualifies, and if you believe that G&T students will do perfectly fine in General Ed programming than how do you justify having any G&T spots at all?" For over a decade now, the response has been: radio silence.
Time for NY to follow LAUSD’s lead and offer more. All students are screened, with guardian permission in 2nd grade, students can enter gifted tracked/accelerated tracks with high test scores or through arts identifications or highly gifted pathways. Low income children get an automatic points boost. There are full gifted magnet programs (not enough slots) but also many high quality local programs that students can enter as well as a few test based programs. Students can access *four* levels of middle school math and schools are *delighted* with them to and happy to have these high performing/lower stress kids from other schools enter.
As a parent of elementary-school G&Ters, I'm turned off this article by the way it uncritically presents the voice of Yiatin Chu without mentioning her relationship to pro-segregation and anti-LGBT group P.L.A.C.E. and treats her as "just another parent" instead of someone trying to weaponize granular school issues in service of a right-wing culture-war agenda.
Why are there not seats for all who qualify? I am a retired gifted program director who continually wrote grants to qualify non trained teachers to be trained to teach gifted students at each one’s level. I’m sorry, there’s no excuse for this …. Especially when we have an over abundance of special ed teachers in MS, elementary and HS…. Is there criteria to prove special education teachers are making a difference for these children? There are criteria for gifted ed!
I have asked the Department of Ed the following question repeatedly, "If you believe that G&T students require different programming that those who don't, then how can you justify not offering a seat to everyone who qualifies, and if you believe that G&T students will do perfectly fine in General Ed programming than how do you justify having any G&T spots at all?" For over a decade now, the response has been: radio silence.