Education Cost

« The issue of education is nowadays very divided.

This article, published in The New York Times in October and written by Eliza Shapiro, discusses the issue of integration in prestigious schools. This article tells us about a school in New York, in the Harlem district, which would be the proof that it is possible to integrate very selective schools. Eliza Shapiro presents TAG Young Scholars as one of the most successful schools in New York, but also as a school where diversity is encouraged thanks to its admission policy: more than a third of its students are black and Hispanic.

Eric Crump, the father of a black student, later explains that any type of student can be gifted, not only whites and Asians. The issue of programs for gifted students is a real tyranny for New York's public school system. Experts appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio found it unfair to create separate classrooms for gifted students and recommended the elimination of the current system.

But this statement was challenged by a group of parents whose children are at the TAG, explaining that a separate class for gifted children can be diverse, containing blacks, whites, Asians...

The New York school system is mainly composed of blacks and Hispanics, it is strange to see that they represent only 25% of the student population in selective schools. TAG is a unique school in the sense that more than 30% of students are Black and Hispanic and has the highest rate of students living in poverty of all five so-called gifted schools in the city.

Last year, the school prioritized about 40 per cent of the spaces in its new kindergarten class for low- income students.

However, its admission policy is not unique: Brooklyn School of Inquiry adopted the same priority in kindergarten last year.

Despite this, nearly 90% of them were still white and Asian last year. The most gifted schools reinforce the idea that gifted children should be separated from other students: Allison Roda, a professor at the Institute of Public Health, says that gifted students need separate instruction.

But many people do not agree with him.

Matt Gonzales, director of an integration initiative at the Metropolitan Center of N.Y.U.

for research on equity and school transformation, questions the case of gifted students and "Is it to provide enrichment, or to give them a title or status that will carry them throughout their lives?" The final paradox is that some parents and educators in gifted schools have said that the system is unfair and that it must be changed, but without saying that it must be completely blown up.. »