New York City has a form of education governance called mayoral control, initiated by billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2002, in which the mayor appoints most of the school board members and selects the chancellor of the system. Bloomberg claimed at the time that he knew how to solve all the problems of education, and he appointed an attorney with no education experience (Joel Klein) as his chancellor. Klein brought in McKinsey and a host of business consultants to reorganize the school system repeatedly. On the one occasion in 2004 when the city’s school board voted to oppose a decision by the mayor (who wanted to end social promotion for third graders, an idea championed by Jeb Bush), he (and the borough president of Staten Island) fired three dissenting members of the panel on the spot.
‘‘This is what mayoral control is all about,” Mr. Bloomberg said last night. ”In the olden days, we had a board that was answerable to nobody. And the Legislature said it was just not working, and they gave the mayor control. Mayoral control means mayoral control, thank you very much. They are my representatives, and they are going to vote for things that I believe in.”
In light of the mayor’s control of education, it came as a shock when the city’s “Panel on Educational Policy” voted 8-7 to oppose the mayor’s plan to continue testing 4-year-olds for admission to the highly coveted “gifted and talented program.” Both the mayor and the chancellor admitted that the testing program was a terrible idea, but insisted that it should be given just one year more. A majority of the panel thought that it made no sense to do the wrong thing “just one more time.” Children in the gifted program get extra enrichment that should be available to all students.
Chalkbeat reports:
In an extraordinary rebuke to Mayor Bill de Blasio, a New York City education panel early Thursday morning rejected a testing contract — halting, for now, the controversial practice of testing incoming kindergartners for admission to gifted programs.
With testing originally scheduled for this spring, it’s unclear how admissions to the city’s gifted and talented programs will move ahead.
The rejection was an unusual flex for a panel that has little formal authority, is mostly appointed by the mayor, and has acted largely as a rubber stamp for his education policies. Approval seemed like a forgone conclusion when Mayor Bill de Blasio announced earlier this month that the entrance test would continue for one more year. But that required the Panel for Educational Policy to approve an extension of the city’s contract with the company that provides the entrance exams, at a cost of $1.7 million.
Instead, the vote failed 8-7, despite City Hall’s intense lobbying behind the scenes and the appointment of a new panel member just a day earlier. The rejection came even after Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan appeared at the virtual meeting, promising future significant reforms to the gifted program. In the meantime, the city proposed several admissions tweaks aimed at creating more diversity for the incoming kindergarten class.
New York City is one of the only school districts in the nation that uses a test given to preschoolers to determine admission to elementary school gifted programs. Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza have both criticized the exam, but intended to use it this year while pursuing long-term changes.
“This is a very challenging topic. As a pedagogue, as a principal, as a parent, I can say with certainty that there is a better way to serve our learners than a test given to 4-year-olds,” Carranza said at Wednesday’s meeting. “That’s why we want this to be the last year this test is administered.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I wonder which PEP members will take the heat for this? (It was a close vote!) If de Blasio was politically astute (and the jury is definitely out on that), he would cancel the g&t testing and blame the PEP for forcing him not to do something that he doesn’t particularly want to do anyway.
Now there is no plan on how to proceed with G&T going forward. In my District there are 200 K G&T seats. Many of the children who attend those G&T programs do not live within the schools’s catchment zone. Who will fill those seats? In a Chalkbeat report yesterday there was a table showing that two of the most “coveted” K-5 schools in our District experienced an almost 20% decline in enrollment. Who will fill those seats? All this has proceeded to do is to create more uncertainty for families who have been enduring this pandemic for almost a year and further the Covid-induced public school crisis in NYC. De Blasio is a poor leader.
With regard to the extra enrichment I don’t know of any G&T program where the children get “extra enrichment”. Everyone follows the DOE curriculum. PTA resources are shared among all children, even though at some schools it’s the G&T parents doing most of the fundraising. In part I suspect that what happened last night had to do with what happened during the daytime – the SHSAT was administered. The anti-screen crowd had not been able to prevent the SHSAT from being administered, so they took it out on another program.
“Many of the children who attend those G&T programs do not live within the schools’s catchment zone. Who will fill those seats? ”
Just to clarify, am I right that you are saying that parents who sent their kids to an out of catchment school to be in a Kindergarten g&t class would never send their kids there if their kids had to be in classes that included the regular “ungifted” 5 year olds in the school?
Actually, maybe without 200 seats, those schools could specialize in having very small class sizes!
The constant uncertainty is the worst part of being a parent in NYC public schools. It takes so much to navigate the system, and all the while you’re surrounded by advocacy groups applying pressure to “disrupt and dismantle” the system. I went through this stuff for my daughter’s entire education (she’s a senior this year) and for all of my son’s through middle school, but I’ve had it. We’re out next year for private school.
My advice to young parents in the city: move to an area where kids go to school based on where they live, and where you are comfortable with the local schools. The constant stress of NYC public school is not worth it.
FLERP! – I have also gone through this stuff for a long time.
I also grew up in a suburb where kids went to school based on where they live. There are good and bad parts of that also. I always find it odd that some parents (not you, FLERP!) are terrified of not having their child is a special “g&t” kindergarten, and threaten to move to the suburbs where they don’t have special “g&t” kindergarten classes! I guess being with less gifted kids is fine with them under the right circumstances?
Comparing the two doesn’t make much sense to me because when residents are spread out in primarily single family homes, attending a school “based on where they live” means attending one school that has a wide ranging catchment. But NYC is so dense that those catchment areas are small and geography isn’t at play the same way.
The irony is that what de Blasio is doing is actually LESS stressful for 5th grade students because a lottery means that the student doesn’t feel like he or she didn’t get their choice because they weren’t good enough.
Once this is in place for a few years, middle school parents may wonder why they ever thought the other system was better.
You may find that private school has its own problems and stresses. As in all schools, you will like it if your kid is happy, and dislike it if your kid isn’t happy and the school administrators and teachers aren’t responsive (despite the marketing of private schools that small class sizes and caring teachers who will understand your child’s particular learning style, your mileage may vary).
Also, in suburban schools where students all feed into one middle and high school, there is also competition to get into certain honors classes or get a specific teacher!
I agree with you that NYC is a complex system that makes it hard on kids, but I do think that every school system has upsides and downsides and what matters is whether the downsides of any system are impacting your child more than the upsides.
Where I grew up, there were two types of “G&T.” One was skipping a grade. The other was “enrichment” activities to supplement regular curriculum. Enrichment was like a punishment — everyone else got to go home and play and you had to stay and be enriched.
“The irony is that what de Blasio is doing is actually LESS stressful for 5th grade students because a lottery means that the student doesn’t feel like he or she didn’t get their choice because they weren’t good enough.”
I definitely do not consider it unstressful to be placed in a lottery and having no idea what school you’ll be sent to. To each his own, I guess, but low stress for a parent is being able to plan your child’s education, and for a child, it’s knowing you’ll be going to school with your friends (assuming of course you have friends and don’t feel the need to escape your bullies).
Nothing is perfect, but I would rather have a stable education system that my family liked, with control over entry and exit points, than the chaos and political battleground of the NYC system. It served us well for a while, but it no longer makes sense for us, and I do advise young parents to get out if they can.
FLERP!
I was right with you until your last paragraph: “I do advise young parents to get out if they can.”
When I advise other parents, I tell them the pros and cons of how NYC public school choice works. I don’t advise them based on how it worked for my kid because their kid might be very different. There are many kids who would be ill served by a typical suburban school system with no diversity. And there are many other kids who get too stressed if they have to attend a middle school with lots of new students instead of one that just carries on with all the same students in their elementary school.
FLERP! says: “I definitely do not consider it unstressful to be placed in a lottery and having no idea what school you’ll be sent to.” You are correct. But it is just as stressful – some would say even more stressful – to be 9 years old and told that whatever “grades” your teacher gave you and your performance on a standardized test will be the reason you attend a middle school or are deemed not good enough to attend it.
In other words, students haven’t known what school they’d be sent to since Bloomberg enacted school choice in 2004! That kind of stress of unknowing isn’t related to whether admissions is lottery based or based on something else. If anything, de Blasio’s new policies would lessen the stress, not increase it.
(Can you imagine that there was a whole industry of test prep tutors for 4th graders that used to charge high hourly rates, and now parents would have no reason to hire them! Even if state tests are re-instituted, 4th grade students can take them cold, like most do in 3rd grade, because there won’t be the pressure on them because their future depends on it!)
I hope your kid thrives in his private school. My kid has thrived in various public schools, but if a parent asks, I always give them the pros and cons because no school – whether public or private – is right for every kid. (And as you are well aware, I distrust any school administrators who make claims that their schools are miracle-workers because anyone who overpraises a school or makes over the top claims of how perfect it is, is not telling the truth.)
We eventually left NYC, reluctantly, because my husband’s employer had moved hdqtrs to NJ. There was still an outpost in Manhattan; he tried for a couple of years working from there and shuttling to NJ when reqd, but it became unworkable.
But facts are, we’d long known we’d have to go. The die was cast when we ended up– surprisingly, delightedly– having 3 kids in a row after marrying late & experiencing 5 yrs of infertility. We knew we’d leave because there was no way in hell we wanted to go thro what friends did, with the selection/ admissions reqd to get kids into a safe/ decent hisch, it was like starting the college adm nightmare 4 yrs early– plus the prospect of waving bye at the crack of dawn as they set off daily on long subway rides at 14yo.
We had super 2’s programs and PreK’s at our fingertips. Our local elemsch was fine, and the nbhd midsch seemed OK. Then came the crack epidemic. I found myself wheeling the stroller to playgroup past the playground of the middle school now strewn with vials and needles every morning. So we’d have to leave after elemsch– we knew we couldn’t afford 3 privsch tuitions for midsch.
Everything FLERP says is precisely what we anticipated & didn’t want, constant stress around the kids’ public schooling. Neither of us– hubby a city kid & me raised rural– wanted what we imagined would be a socially-constricting, lily-white suburban lifestyle. Fortunately our fears were exaggerated.
and the entire “navigate the system” mess is also one more way to weed out the haves from the have nots
I don’t think he cares either way.
If we had dramatically reduced teacher to student ratio, teacher driven curricula, and portfolio assessment as a practice, we would be able to serve all students’ gifts. Testing 4 year olds for giftedness is laughable malpractice.
I can’t believe they ever tested 4 year olds. Total misunderstanding of and disregard for human cognitive development.
As a Principal I would go into kindergarten classrooms as they cried through tests they had to take on IPADs. This would anger me and ruin my day. It was so inappropriate.
Angers me picturing it. No, not angers; riles to action, in writing.
You should see the elite private school admissions. They test them. And then they bring them in for a fake play date that’s actually a kind of group interview, so they can see how they interact with other kids. That part creeped me out way more than the test.
Thank you, Diane. I loved your statement regarding Bloomberg and Klein.”Klein brought in McKinsey and a host of business consultants to reorganize the school system repeatedly.” Their idea of reform was constant reorganization and changing the name from Board of Education to Department of Education.
Shout out to parents opposed to testing and all proponents of diversity who couldn’t wait any longer as de Blasio and Carranza wanted to stall one more year. Always–tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Their operating principle has been: Never put off until tomorrow that which you can do the day after.
Not true – middle school admissions drastically changed this year.
Middle school admissions affects some 80,000 5th graders. g&t for Kindergarten affects a few thousand 5 year olds.
It seemed obvious to me that de Blasio and Carranza (who have always signaled their lack of support for continuing the g&t programs) were prioritizing what changes would have the most impact instead of trying to fight battles on multiple fronts at the same time if they didn’t have to.
There is definitely an argument to be made that he should be able to upend the entire system all at the same time, but what many progressives don’t notice is the impactful changes that he is making more quietly, like middle school admissions.
Even with the SHSAT — people don’t realize that de Blasio made a huge change which reserves 20% of the seats in specialized high schools for students from high poverty low performing schools that almost never sent students to those high schools. Maybe he is quietly going to increase that to 25% or 30% of seats if that is legal.
There is a new mayoral race and I really haven’t heard many of the candidates weighing in on these issues that most politicians won’t touch. Even AOC – when she spoke about specialized high schools which her father attended – spoke about “making all schools good” rather than “we need to eliminate the SHSAT”. Which is not much different than what defenders of the SHSAT say when they say “keep the SHSAT and make all schools good, too”
As a parent who has been in the system for quite a while, I have been astonished at how many progressive changes de Blasio made in education in 7 years – started with universal pre-k and ending with enacting policies that lead to more integration in schools. I realize he could have forced even more changes sooner, but I find it odd that some progressives hate him because they only focus on what he didn’t do, while people on the right hate him because of the progressive changes he did make that they hate!
Many good points. But his tendency–even before he was a lame duck — was to make pronouncements without thinking about the consequences or about how to implement them. Ditto for Carranza.
They may deserve credit for having their hearts in the right place.
PS I would say that Maya Wiley has been the most progressive of all mayoral, candidates on the issues of integration and diversity. AOC isn’t the be-all and end-all — and I don’t thinks it is shallow or evasive for her to say all schools should be good.
In Finland, for what it’s worth, the national goal is to have good public schools in every neighborhood. And they have achieved it. Of course, they don’t have the dramatic inequality that our society has and finds tolerable.
Thank you – I read Maya Wiley’s education platform and it sounds great. But it doesn’t seem very different than what de Blasio and Carranza say to me. (In fact, some of the rhetoric on the website is not that much different from what I hear some pro-charter ed reformers say, although I know Wiley is progressive and a strong supporter of public schools).
I know Wiley chaired that task force on diversity and ending g&t – has she come out publicly this month (when this was in the news) to demand that there be no g&t testing this year? I was looking to see if I could find her using her Mayoral candidacy public platform to say that there should be no g&t test this year and could not find anything (but may have missed it).
I know that the Mayor gave lip service to the recommendations of the advisory group that Maya Wiley co-chaired. It was a large group comprising all stakeholders (ugh) including students. Many recommendations were set forth. There was an interim report and a final report. The Mayor was preoccupied with his run for president to devote serious attention to something as secondary to his ambitions.
Meanwhile, that report and other presentations Maya Wiley gave showed me she is a consensus builder and a person who is thoughtfully progressive. This says nothing about her DNA as regards criminal justice and police/prison reform.
Fred Smith,
Maya Wiley sounds great, but did she take a position on abolishing the SHSAT or the g&t test this year? I didn’t think that was a difficult question. Those are two positions progressives support and right now every Mayoral candidate should make their position clear on those issues.
I am happy for her to avoid taking an unpopular position and wait to “build consensus” but I don’t see how de Blasio gets bashed for delaying doing progressive things because he was unable to “build consensus” while he gets bashed for doing progressive things because “he didn’t wait to build a consensus”! I thought progressives finally understood that waiting to “build consensus” never seems to work.
Maybe Wiley will be like Biden — she can avoid taking any strong positions on unpopular things (like outright abolishing the SHSAT or the g&t test this year) but quietly make the changes to do them. I’d be happy with that, as long as it isn’t Obama 2.0, where she waits for “consensus” that never comes and doesn’t make the decisions that de Blasio did that made him unpopular but actually did some good.
But de Blasio does a lot more than give lip service. That’s why there is only lottery based middle school choice this year. That’s why he set aside 20% of seats in specialized high schools for an expanded Discovery program. That’s why he cancelled Bloomberg’s DOE charter giveaway free co-locations (which had unintended consequences due to pro-charter Dems in Albany that he then tried to raise money to defeat). That’s why he ended stop and frisk when everyone said crime would increase, and started universal pre-k. It always astonishes me that de Blasio is viewed as an inept screw up. He is very bad at communications, but he was brave enough to try to make progressive changes and not just talk about it while waiting for “consensus”. He sometimes failed and sometimes succeeded, but I appreciated him being brave enough to try.
That’s why he did favors for dirty guys who gave big money to his campaign (arranging real estate and zoning favors for some and removing civil servants who protested). Too close to the line when it comes to ethics. As Sal Albanese said when BdB ran virtually unchallenged for re-election – the Mayor ran a pay for play game. The press accepted his second term as inevitable and acted accordingly. That’s why so many of his staff bailed on him. Including Wiley who is tarred by her association. That’s why he’s a rank hypocrite in matters of transparency—which he trumpeted as public advocate. A shiftless lifelong politician who has done some good things. Mr. Clean he’s not.
Sent from the all new Aol app for iOS
“Mr Clean he’s not”
Right, but who said de Blasio was Mr. Clean? I do believe he is as clean as the typical NYC politician and they have all done favors – like Mike Bloomberg giving his favorite charter chain free space in public schools when charters were supposed to be responsible for paying for their own space (as some charters had to do because their promoters were not pals with Bloomberg’s pals).
I guess I remember some of the same criticisms made of David Dinkins that I heard about de Blasio — they were never good enough and the good things they did were minimized while the media and critics seemed to only focus on the negatives. It’s frustrating to me that Koch and Giuliani and Bloomberg – who all deserved far more criticism early in their tenures – got fawned over by the media, with all corruption minimized, any misstep by Dinkins and de Blasio got magnified and when it came to defending them, and no one on the left seemed to mount a strong defense of them either. Dinkins was also criticized on the left for being too cozy with the real estate/business establishment and expanding the police. Both Dinkins and de Blasio began as progressives but ended up being disliked by progressives despite the good things they did.
I just hope the next progressive Mayor gets a chance to not be perfect, because the next progressive Mayor is not going to be perfect, but that doesn’t mean that Mayor won’t do some good things and make mistakes, too.
Thanks again for recommending Maya Wiley! The more I read, the more impressive she sounds and looking forward to learning more about her promising candidacy. (I confess I haven’t read enough about all the candidates yet, and definitely need to.)
I appreciate your cogent remarks and perspective. I’m glad we end on a note of conciliation since we’re fundamentally on the same side here.
Thanks, I enjoyed this conversation as well.
I just saw that the Mayoral candidates did an education policy panel last night via zoom, so I watched a bit of Maya Wiley. She’d clearly make a good candidate, although she didn’t take any particularly controversial positions (not her fault since she wasn’t asked to). She definitely supported the progressive ideas of equity and more integration and gave a positive shout out to P-Tech, and hopefully she is better at building consensus than de Blasio (although there was a lot of consensus that almost no one liked him!)
But I’m planning to watch the other candidates, too, when I get a chance. The forum was sponsored by a NYU and Columbia law school education group – didn’t seem to get much publicity, but of interest to people here since it was specifically about education.
Gifted and Talented Test
The four year old has gift
For finger painting craft
And test reveals the rift
‘twixt G&T and raff
Children are real neat;
They are the wheat.
Politicians make me laugh;
They are the chaff.
I am not convinced that you are a NYC public school parent, because it seems that you are not aware how K placement happens. For G&T you list your choices in order, the DOE conducts the lottery, and they assign your child to a school. For GenEd K admission you can list whichever schools you like, but they will almost always assign you to your zoned school. If a parent would like to their child to attend an out-of-zone GenEd, they can contact the school, but often all the seats are filled by in-zone children. Your stereotyping of G&T parents is not appreciated.
Smaller class sizes may sound wonderful, but understand that in NYC the financial structure of the DOE rewards large class sizes. Schools are paid per pupil. Parents love small class sizes, but administrators don’t.
Beth,
I’m now a NYC parent of a much older student, so I apologize if I didn’t realize exactly how some of the changes worked.
Has the g&t placement changed so that all 4 year olds who score 90+ are in the same lottery, or does that lottery still place the students who scored 99 first, then 98, then 97 (but allow students who scored 97 to get priority over 99s if the 97 is a sibling?)
I’m not stereotyping anyone. But I can recall when elementary schools that had a hard time attracting more affluent parents would have a g&t program. And what happened sometimes is that once the parents were in the school for a while and learned that the other students were just typical 5 year olds, that g&t program would be phased out. There are schools like PS 29 in Brooklyn and PS 116 that used to have g&t programs that got phased out.
Do you really think that phasing out g&t programs that start in K is a big deal? Because that’s what I don’t understand.
How about this compromise? If I were de Blasio, I would first end all citywide K admission and open a few more g&t classes in underused, unpopular local elementary schools. No more entire schools that are only g&t that start in K. (There aren’t very many). Parents can have their g&t classes in less popular elementary schools that have non g&t classes, and maybe what happened in many schools (does PS 11 still have g&t?) eventually parents will decide the elementary school is fine without it.
Wait one more year = wait while we figure out how to manage the privilege demands of people in a system that rations artificially scarce resources.
It seems to me that gifted and talented programs at the kindergarten level are a way for wealthy parents(who can afford to pay for tutoring) to game the system and keep their children away from those “others” who are not in the same social class. We all believe in equality of opportunity until it affects our own children.