“Thank you to our superintendents, community leaders, and families for working together with us to ensure there is access to the Gifted & Talented program in every community. “Family and community engagement is critical to the success of our students and of this program,” said Chancellor Banks. “Working with families, teachers, and community leaders, we were able to make this expansion happen, and now students from every school district will be able to access a Gifted & Talented program.” “By expanding our Gifted & Talented program to all New York City districts, we are giving every young person an opportunity to grow, to learn, to explore their talents and imagination, and we are making sure no child is left behind,” said Mayor Adams. Banks today announced that applications for the expanded kindergarten and third grade Gifted & Talented programs will open next Tuesday, May 31, 2022. The gifted admissions process has been in flux over the past two years because of pandemic disruptions and reform efforts, further pushing back the timeline.Įducation department officials said they heard feedback from families asking to move up the timeline to make it easier to plan for the coming year.Īpplications for middle and high schools, which are run through a separate process and are not related to gifted and talented applications, are due Thursday.NEW YORK – New York City Mayor Eric Adams and New York City Department of Education (DOE) Chancellor David C. Admissions decisions typically came in June, weeks after the city sent out general kindergarten offers. Prior to the pandemic, when admission to the program was determined by a single entrance exam, students typically sat for the test in January, got the results back later in the spring, and then submitted applications. Officials did not immediately provide demographics of students who received offers to the program this year.įamilies have pushed for years to move up the timeline for the admissions process to gifted and talented programs, which aims to place students deemed to need accelerated instruction in separate schools and classes. The shift to a teacher recommendation and lottery-based admissions system noticeably shifted the demographics, more than doubling the share of Black and Hispanic students admitted for the 2021-2022 school year compared to the prior year.
When Mayor Eric Adams and schools Chancellor David Banks took office, they reversed de Blasio’s plan, opting to preserve and expand the separate gifted and talented track, but did not bring back the entrance exam.īanks added 100 seats to the kindergarten program and 1,000 seats to a separate gifted program that starts in third-grade, and selects students based on their second-grade marks.īanks argued at the time that adding the seats and ensuring that every geographic school district had options would “provid more opportunities for accelerated learning to more families, while providing an equitable, fair process to identify the students who will excel with accelerated learning.” Under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city switched to an admissions system based on teacher recommendations and a lottery, with plans to eventually phase out all separate gifted and talented classes altogether.
That move forced the city to shift gears. The pandemic threw gifted admissions into disarray, with a stunning vote in January 2021 by the city’s Panel for Educational Policy, a supervisory board that approves education department expenditures, that canceled the contract for the entrance exam given to 4-year-olds. In 2020, only 11%% of students who received offers to gifted programs were Black and Hispanic, compared to 66% of public school kindergarteners citywide.
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The application process changes are the latest in a series of reforms to the program that has attracted fierce criticism for its segregating effects. “This year’s changes to the kindergarten application process will increase access to gifted and talented programming and make the process easier for families.” “This process may be a family’s first interaction with our schools, and it’s important we get it right and make it welcoming and easy,” said education department first deputy chancellor Dan Weisberg in a statement.
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