Zohran's Outburst Angers NYC Parents, But He's Not Wrong

The Evolution of Gifted Education

The concept of gifted education has long been a topic of debate, particularly when it comes to identifying and nurturing young talents. The journey of gifted programs in New York City offers a compelling case study into the challenges and complexities of determining a child's potential at an early age.

Early Experiences with Gifted Programs

When I was a kindergartner in the 1980s, the “gifted” programming for my class could be found inside of a chest. I don’t know what toys and learning materials lived there, since I wasn’t one of the handful of presumably more academically advanced kiddos that my kindergarten teacher invited to open the chest. My distinct impression at the time was that my teacher didn’t think I was worthy of the enrichment because I frequently spilled my chocolate milk at lunch and I had also once forgotten to hang a sheet of paper on the class easel—instead painting an elaborate and detailed picture on the stand itself. The withering look on my teacher’s face after seeing the easel assured me that gifted I was not.

This memory, and the enduring mystery of that chest, resurfaced recently when New York City mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani announced that if elected on Tuesday, he would support ending kindergarten entry to the city’s public school gifted program. Although many pundits and parents debated the political fallout of the proposal—the city’s segregated gifted program has for decades been credited with keeping many white and wealthier families in the public school system—I wondered what exactly it means to be a gifted kindergartner. In New York City, the determination is made several months before kindergarten starts, but how good is a screening mechanism for 4-year-olds at predicting academic prowess years down the road?

The Scope of Gifted Programs

New York is not unique in opting to send kids as young as preschool down an accelerated path, no repeat display of giftedness required. It’s common practice at many private schools to try to measure young children’s academic abilities for admissions purposes. Other communities, including Houston and Miami, start gifted or accelerated programs in public schools as early as kindergarten, according to the National Center for Research on Gifted Education. When I reported on schools in New Orleans 15 years ago, they even had a few gifted prekindergarten programs at highly sought-after public schools that enrolled 4-year-olds whose seemingly stunning intellectual abilities were determined at age 3. It’s more common, however, for gifted programs in public schools to start between grades 2 and 4, according to the center’s surveys.

Strategies for Identifying Gifted Children

There are three main strategies used to assign young children to gifted programs, according to the center. The most common path is cognitive testing, which attempts to rate a child’s intelligence in relation to their peer group. Then there is achievement testing, which is supposed to measure how much and how fast a child is learning in school. The third strategy is teacher evaluations. Some districts use the three measures in combination with one another.

For nearly four decades, New York prioritized the first strategy, deploying an ever-evolving array of cognitive and IQ tests on its would-be gifted 4-year-olds—tests that families often signed up for in search of competitive advantage as much as anything else.

Concerns About Equity and Reliability

Equity and reliability have been long-running concerns for districts relying on cognitive tests. In New York, public school parents in some districts were once able to pay private psychologists to evaluate their children—a permissiveness that led to “a series of alleged abuses,” wrote Norm Fruchter, a now-deceased activist, educator, and school board leader in a 2019 journal article titled “The Spoils of Whiteness: New York City’s Gifted and Talented Programs.”

In New Orleans, there was a similar disparity between the public and private testing of 3-year-olds when I lived and reported on schools there. Families could sit on a waitlist, sometimes for months, to take their children through the free process at the district central office. In 2008, the year I wrote about the issue, only five of the 153 3-year-olds tested by the district met the gifted benchmark. But families could also pay a few hundred dollars and go to a private tester who, over the same time period, identified at least 64 children as gifted.

The Shift to Teacher Evaluations

Partly because of the concerns about cognitive tests, New York City dropped intelligence testing entirely in 2021 and shifted to declaring kindergartners gifted based on pre-K teacher recommendations. A recent article in Chalkbeat noted that after testing ended for the youngest, diversity in the kindergarten gifted program increased: In 2023–24, 30 percent of the children were Black and Latino, compared to just 12 percent in 2020. Teachers in the programs also describe enrolling a broader range of students, including more neurodivergent ones.

The Challenges of Teacher Evaluations

The big problem, according to several experts, is that when hundreds of individual pre-K teachers evaluate 4-year-olds for giftedness, any consistency in defining it can get lost, even if the teachers are guided on what to look for. “The word is drained of meaning because teachers are not thinking about the same thing,” said Sam Meisels, the founding executive director of the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska.

The Ideal Vision for Gifted Education

No one denies that access to gifted programming has been transformative for countless children. McCoach, the Fordham professor, points out that there should be something more challenging for the kids who arrive at kindergarten already reading and doing arithmetic, who might be bored moving at the regular pace.

In an ideal world, experts say, there would be universal screening for giftedness (a method some districts, but not New York, have embraced), using multiple measures in a thoughtful way, and there would be frequent entry—and exit—points for the programs. In the early elementary years, that would look less like separate gifted programming and a lot more like meeting every kid where they are.

Conclusion

At some point a year or two after kindergarten, I did get the chance to be among the chosen when I was selected for a pullout program known as BEEP. I have no recollection of how we were picked, how often we met, or what we did, apart from a performance the BEEP kids held of St. George and the Dragon. I played St. George, and I remember uttering one line, declaring my intent to fight the dragon or die. I also remember vividly how much being in BEEP boosted my confidence in my potential—probably its greatest gift.

Forty years later, the research is clear that every kid deserves the chance—and not just one—to slay a dragon. “You want to give every child the best opportunity to learn as possible,” said Meisels. But when it comes to separate gifted programming for select early elementary school students, “is there something out there that says their selection is valid? We don’t have that. It seems,” he added, “to be a case of people just fooling themselves with the language.”