How can you tell if a preschooler is gifted? In the late 1990s, researchers at the Center for Gifted Development in Colorado approached the question by asking parents of older children who were deemed intellectually advanced what sort of characteristics manifested themselves early on.
A vast majority of those surveyed noted that their children were highly observant and spoke with sophistication, one parent reporting that at 2½, his child described Rudolph as “ostracized” by the other reindeer, and another quoting a 3-year-old who prefaced sentences with the words, “Well, apparently….” These children tended to be perfectionists, funny, puzzle-adept and prone to posing detailed questions about politics or nuclear war. Researchers concluded that some of these advantages stemmed from natural ability and the rest from nurturing, writing, “You just can’t create a gifted child from scratch like Yuppie pasta.”
For years now, education scholars have been riled by the persistent belief that the exceptional child is the one who most resembles an engaging and bookish 38-year-old, a view that has enormous consequences for the policies formulated around access to accelerated learning. “I think that the debate would be elevated if people understood that they are operating on archaic models of what giftedness is,” Jonathan Plucker, a professor of education at Johns Hopkins University, told me recently. A huge body of research tells us that children develop along a varied pace, that intelligence has many complex aspects, that deficits in one area can coexist with dazzling ability in another.
“Most people in the field don’t use the word ‘gifted’ anymore,” he said.
Although New York City’s school system still clings to the phrase, Mayor Eric Adams announced last month that he was getting rid of the standardized test that had been the sole criterion for admission into gifted and talented programs for elementary schools since the Bloomberg years. Under the old model, a 4-year-old who could not master an exam in which she might be shown five pictures each with a different number of apples and asked how many apples grandma needs to make sauce, would in all likelihood get shut out of the track leading to elite high school admission and all the privileges that follow.
Rather than eliminating programs, which have foreclosed opportunity for thousands of Black and Latino children, the city has put the task of identifying “giftedness” in 4- and 5-year-olds exclusively in the hands of prekindergarten teachers who recommend eligible students, who are in turn ordained gifted and talented by lottery.
Developed in the name of equity, the new process is meant to expand the ranks of students who have been traditionally deprived a certain kind of education, something that more progressively designed versions of the entrance exam did not manage to do. While the absence of a test means that no one can be expensively tutored to game it, leaving the decisions to the opinions of single teacher exposes the mechanism to to the vagaries of personal affinity, mood and whim, despite best intentions.
Imagine that you are a teacher sitting down in your kitchen with a beer and the nomination form provided by the Department of Education after a chaotic day in which Sam or Luis or Jack or Shaquille or all of them drove you to the brink, fidgeting and refusing to sit in the circle while you were reading “I Want My Hat Back.” How likely would you be to suggest any of them?
And how equipped are you to make these calls in the first place? Last month, teachers were given a tutorial in the form of an eight-and-a-half-minute video instructing them on how to approach the nominations with guidelines broad enough to make any child a likely candidate. “Curiosity,” teachers are told, should be an indicator. (Is the child, the text asks, “curious about new experiences, information and activities and/or people?” It is the rare 4-year-old who isn’t.)
Alerting teachers that they must push through their implicit biases in an enterprise that is inherently subjective, the tutorial asks them to consider all the ways that children might express their curiosity and ideas “verbally or non-verbally” citing for example dance or drawing. This is helpful only to the extent that these activities are featured in schools where the arts are often scaled back in the name of budget constraints.
Earlier this week, I asked Amy Hsin, a sociologist who studies education and inequality and who advised the de Blasio administration, what she made of all this. “To be generous, the idea behind replacing tests with recommendations is based on the assumption that teachers can provide a more well-rounded picture of intellect — that they can pick up things that can’t be picked up by testing,” she said.
“But the problem is, A, that teachers are not trained to know what to look for, and B, that the science does not provide clarity about the things you should be looking for in very young children. What happens in that vacuum is that teachers are just left to make things up. So they’re relying on the same historical markers that have always been used to identify intelligence — race and class.” According to federal data, Black preschool students are expelled at rates more than twice the share of their enrollment.
Last year, when the referral program was put into practice for the first time, the percentage of spots in gifted and talented kindergarten programs offered to Black and Latino children made up fewer than a quarter of the total. While this meant that more than twice as many Black and Latino students were admitted over the previous year, the last in which the standardized test was used to measure giftedness, it is still the case that they represent roughly 70 percent of the public-school system’s population.
The current plan, overseen by the city’s new education chancellor, David Banks, expands the number of gifted and talented seats in kindergarten by 100, bringing the total to 2,500. And while insuring that there will be a program in every community in the city, it also guarantees that many children will be left out. Parents still need to apply for the programs after their children are nominated, meaning that those who are too busy or simply forget or remain out of the loop will miss the opportunity for their children to join the lottery.
None of this will quiet the debates about whether gifted and talented projects are inherently unjust, whether they should be abandoned altogether or whether admissions measures ought to be rethought, something that seems self-evident if they are to remain.
A large school district in Illinois, outside of Chicago, has had success bringing its gifted and talented population in line with the communities it serves. The process combines the use of tests that measure cognitive ability and academic progress and a teacher checklist. Evaluations compare students with peers in their own school rather than across a district or against national norms. Crucially, teachers receive the kind of professional development that extends beyond a video and some support: a 45-hour course on “giftedness.”
