Or: facts are stubborn things…
(And remember: these white liberal parents would have been passionate advocates of busing back in the 70s — as long as it was happening in blue collar Boston, of course…)
The number of children entering New York City public school gifted programs dropped by half this year from last under a new policy intended to equalize access, with 28 schools lacking enough students to open planned gifted classes, and 13 others proceeding with fewer than a dozen children.
The policy, which based admission on a citywide cutoff score on two standardized tests, also failed to diversify the historically coveted classes, according to a New York Times analysis of new Education Department data.
In a school system in which 17 percent of kindergartners and first graders are white, 48 percent of this year’s new gifted students are white, compared with 33 percent of elementary students admitted to the programs under previous entrance policies. The percentage of Asians is also higher, while those of blacks and Hispanics are lower.
(…)
For years, the Bloomberg administration has struggled to rationalize the gifted programs, long derided by critics as bastions of white privilege yet seen by many middle-class New Yorkers as a reason to stay in the city’s public school system.
(…)
they have no plans to change the tests or the 90th percentile cutoff (which was lowered from 95th percentile because too few children met the higher standard).
“The most ridiculous part of all of this is this process was supposed to be easier this year and more accessible, especially to minority parents and parents in District Six,” said Kelley Ragland, a book editor whose son tested into the gifted kindergarten at Public School 153 on Amsterdam Avenue at 147th Street in Manhattan, only to learn the program had been abandoned because too few children enrolled. “And it’s absolutely backfired.”
(via)
Bonus hilarity — or, so much for “colonialism”!:
In 1952, on the fifth anniversary of independence, the Indian government commissioned a survey to find out if the average Indian villager had heard yet that the British had gone. The study was quietly cancelled when early results showed that the average villager had never heard that the British had ever arrived!
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