A recent Daily News survey found that thousands of the city's brightest children are denied a top public-school education due to a paucity of gifted and talented programs. Teachers College's Curriculum and Teaching department chair James Borland agrees, stating "the city is failing it's smartest kids." However, a lack of funds is not the only contributing factor in the shortage of programs.

Resulting from a system that allows each of the 32 districts to determine their own program policies, debates surrounding the cultural, racial, and socioeconomic inequities inherent in measuring intelligence have severely impacted many gifted and talented programs. Assertions that gifted and talented programs are a contemporary version of Jim Crow are compounded by conflicting ideas on the use of IQ tests in determinig potential achievement. "They tend to differentiate between kids from different ethnic, racial, social, and economic groups, " said Borland.

The article, entitled "City schools cheating gifted kids" appeared in the March 17, 2002 edition of the New York Daily News.

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Published Wednesday, Jun. 26, 2002