A System Divided
Gifted, Talented and Separated
In One School, Students Are Divided by Gifted Label — and Race
Dave Sanders for The New York Times
DISPARITY A fourth-grade gifted class taught by Angelo Monserrate at Public School 163. More Photos »
By AL BAKER
IT is just a metal door with three windows, the kind meant to keep the
clamor of an elementary school hallway from piercing a classroom’s
quiet. Other than paint the color of bubble gum, it is unremarkable.
A System Divided
This is the fourth and final article in a series examining the racial distribution of students in New York City’s public schools and its impact on their opportunities and achievements.
Multimedia
But the pink door on Room 311 at Public School 163
on the Upper West Side represents a barrier belied by its friendly hue.
On one side are 21 fourth graders labeled gifted and talented by New
York City’s school system. They are coursing through public school
careers stamped accelerated.
And they are mostly white.
On the other side, sometimes sitting for reading lessons on the floor of
the hallway, are those in the school’s vast majority: They are enrolled
in general or special education programs.
They are mostly children of color.
“I know what we look like,” Carolyn M. Weinberg, a 28-year veteran of
P.S. 163, said of the racial disparities as she stood one day in the
third-floor hallway between Room 318, where she and a colleague teach a
fourth-grade general education class, and the one where Angelo
Monserrate teaches the gifted class, Room 311.
“I know what you see,” said Ms. Weinberg.
There are 652 students enrolled at P.S. 163 this year, from
prekindergarten through fifth grade. Roughly 63 percent of them are
black and Hispanic; whites make up 27 percent; and Asians account for 6
percent.
This reflects the flavor of the neighborhood, and roughly matches the
New York City school system’s overall demographics.
Yet in P.S. 163’s gifted classes, the racial dynamics of the
neighborhood, the school itself and the school system are turned upside
down.
Of the 205 children enrolled in the nine gifted classes, 97, or 47
percent, are white; another 31 of the students, or 15 percent, are
Asian. And a combined 65 students, or 32 percent, are black and
Hispanic.
In the 21 other classes that enroll the school’s remaining 447 students, only 80, or 18 percent, are white.
The disparities are most apparent in the lower grades.
Of the 24 students in Karen Engler’s kindergarten gifted class, one is
black and three are Hispanic. Ayelet Cutler’s first-grade gifted class
has 21 students, one of them black and two Hispanic. There are two
blacks and two Hispanics among the 26 students in Athena Shapiro’s
second-grade gifted class.
On a recent morning, a line of Ms. Cutler’s students moved from the
classroom to the corridor, ahead of the general education class of Linda
Crews. A string of mostly white faces and then a line of mostly black
and Hispanic ones walked down the hall of a school named for a New York
politician who sought to end inequities in education: Alfred E. Smith.
It was 11:25 a.m., and the classes wound their way to the cafeteria, a
cavernous room at the school’s western edge. Once there, the children
sat with those in their own class, each one at a separate long white
table that, for a moment, froze the divisions.
For critics of New York City’s gifted and talented programs,
that image crystallizes what they say is a flawed system that
reinforces racial separation in the city’s schools and contributes to
disparities in achievement.
They contend that gifted admissions standards favor middle-class
children, many of them white or Asian, over black and Hispanic children
who might have equal promise, and that the programs create castes within
schools, one offered an education that is enriched and accelerated, the
other getting a bare-bones version of the material. Because they are
often embedded within larger schools, the programs bolster a false
vision of diversity, these critics say, while reinforcing the negative
stereotypes of class and race.
Despite months of repeated requests, the city’s Education Department
would not provide racial breakdowns of gifted and talented programs and
the schools that house them. But the programs tend to be in wealthier
districts whose populations have fewer black and Hispanic children, and
far more children qualify for them in affluent districts than in poorer
ones.