Leftist Schemes: Nixing Gifted Education Hurts the Kids It’s Designed to “Help”

About 10 years after I graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, I drove by the old place to see how it was doing. The kids were out for lunch, and a profound difference was apparent. Asian-descent (AD) pupils, well represented already when I attended, appeared to be at least 50 percent of the student body.

This was no illusion. At Bx Sci (as it’s known) today, AD enrollment routinely ranges from 60 to 65 percent.

Is this a problem, though, that AD students dominate numerically at a school you must qualify for via testing?

It is to the racial bean counters. For years they’ve been trying to eliminate gifted programs in New York City and elsewhere in “equity’s” name. In 2018, then-Big Apple Mayor Bill de Blasio and then-Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza complained about meritocracy. The specialized schools failed “to reflect the diversity of our city,” they said, calling the qualification process an injustice. Former Mayor Eric Adams branded the situation a “Jim Crow school system.” Dishonestly and not surprisingly, they generally portrayed the problem as one of white “over-representation” — even though white students themselves were “under-represented.” (Hey, “white privilege” gripes get headlines; “yellow privilege” ones would get you canceled.) Yet there’s a kicker here.

This anti-meritocracy agitation doesn’t just harm our nation. It also hurts the very non-white kids the activists claim to care about.

Deconstructing Success

Addressing this tragedy Thursday, investigative reporter John Stossel wrote at the New York Post:

“This is so misguided,” education researcher Michael Petrilli told me.

“These equity people say, ‘Oh, we’re against gifted education.’ At the same time, they’re upset that universities aren’t very diverse.”

But those same equity advocates “are a big part of the problem,” he said.

“They stand in the way of kids of color and low-income kids getting what they need.”

Stossel points out that putting kids on different academic tracks was once standard. It’s just common sense, too, because children aren’t one-size-fits-all; rather, some individuals are more capable than others. It’s also true that — in every time and place — inter-group performance differences have been a reality.

Despite this, an anti-tracking movement began in 1985, Stossel asserts, with an education theorist named Jeannie Oakes. In her book Keeping Track, she warned that the process creates racially segregated classrooms. Yet there’s a simple answer to this:

So what?

Such things only matter to racially oriented people. You may as well worry about the NBA being 75 percent black or the NFL being 100 percent male. You can have meritocracy or group proportionality — but you can’t have both.

So what happened was that tracking was replaced with so-called “differentiated instruction” (DI). This is when a teacher has 30 kids with vastly disparate educational abilities and needs and, somehow, is supposed to figure out how to teach them all simultaneously. As Stossel relates:

“It’s super hard to teach reading to everybody if some don’t know their letters and others are reading ‘Harry Potter,’” Petrilli explained.

For more perspective, consider that it’s a tutor, not a teacher, who provides individualized instruction. But he does this one on one. DI presupposes the impossible: that a teacher can play tutor to more than two dozen kids at the same time.

What Favors the Rich?

Playing devil’s advocate, Stossel related the anti-tracking argument that “richer parents sometimes hire tutors.” As a “result, disproportionate numbers of white and Asian kids get that fast-track education.” In response, Petrilli said it’s more about culture than race. For example, he has seen many poor AD students who do well. Yet there’s another significant point.

Trumping government-school meritocracy doesn’t affect the wealthy nearly as much. After all, they can send their kids to expensive, academically rigorous private schools. Socialist NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani — who has opposed tracking — is a prime example. He attended the Bank Street School for Children in Manhattan, current tuition approximately $70,000 a year.

Whom it does affect brings us back to my Bx Sci days. Conveniently, I lived an eight-minute walk from the school. There were students, though, who’d travel via subway up to 90 minutes each way to attend. It seemed as if many in this boat were the AD kids, and few if any were rich. With their parents not having Daddy Mamdani’s money, Bx Sci was perhaps their only chance to enjoy a good school.

Reality 101

Really, though, what’s this attack on meritocracy supposed to accomplish? Activists behave as if some performance-bestowing magic is occurring at places like Bx Sci. Enter its orbit and voilá! — a little Einstein you become.

Now, The Karate Kid’s Mr. Miyagi famously said, “No such thing as bad student, only bad teacher.” But that’s Hollywood fantasy. In reality, better schools couldn’t be better without a certain prerequisite: better students.

To this day, the most robust intellectual environment (average group IQ) I ever experienced was Bx Sci’s. But the school didn’t create these high-IQ students — they came that way.

In fact, Bx Sci’s campus literally abuts that of another government high school: DeWitt Clinton. And, yes, they appear “segregated” in that the latter is 87 percent black and Hispanic. Clinton is also a typical low-performing Bronx school.

And what would happen if you “Clintonized” Bx Sci, eliminating its selection process and making it “look like the Bronx”? Its student test scores would be like Clinton’s.

Will this happen? Ex-mayor de Blasio axed the exam that identified gifted kindergartners. Some activists would also like to nix the three-hour Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT). (Doing this however, for Bx Sci, Brooklyn Tech, and Stuyvesant would require New York State government approval.)

Related to this, like its neighbors Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, New York has just decided to eliminate its high-school exit-exam graduation requirement (the “Regents” test in the Empire State). What would this accomplish? Well, just consider the Baltimore mother who was told that her son graduated in his class’s top 50 percent.

This was despite his passing only three of his classes in high school.

So the anti-tracking agitation isn’t surprising. Poorly gifted social engineers wouldn’t want the gifted recognized. Nor would they want revealed how stupid the products of their schooling actually are.