Amid mounting debate about how New York City public schools can improve education equity, Amy Stuart Wells, Professor of Sociology and Education, argues in the Gotham Gazette that new recommendations by the city’s School Diversity Advisory Group for overhauling “gifted and talented” education programs are solidly based on research.
Amy Stuart Wells, Professor of Sociology and Education. (Photo: TC Archive)
Wells and her coauthor, NeQuan C. McLean — both members of the advisory group that made recommendations to the New York City Department of Education — write that the city’s current gifted and talented programs “admit students based on an arbitrary cut-off score on one standardized test” and “are disproportionately located in affluent areas of the city and relatedly, serve a disproportionate number of white and Asian students.”
”It’s time to let go of our 20th century model of educating a small number of students with poorly-defined academic "gifts" and adopt a 21st century model of appreciating the many different gifts within students and the family and community cultures that foster them,” they write.
Read the full op-ed in Gotham Gazette.