Students in the school district serving Manhattan’s Upper West Side scored seats in coveted kindergarten gifted programs at a higher rate than kids in any other neighborhood in the city this year, new data show.
Roughly 47 percent of the 968 young test-takers in District 3 did well enough on the two required exams to land a seat in a district or citywide accelerated program.
In Manhattan’s District 2 — which includes the tony TriBeCa, West Village and Upper East Side neighborhoods — 834 incoming kindergartners qualified for a gifted slot, or just under 47 percent of those tested.
By contrast, 10 school districts covering largely high-poverty neighborhoods — including four of the six districts in The Bronx and the two districts covering Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn — each had 25 or fewer students qualify for accelerated classes.
In District 9 in the Southwest Bronx, just 9.3 percent of test-takers qualified — the lowest rate in the city.
The South Bronx’s District 7 had both the fewest number of incoming kindergarten students tested, 70, and the fewest number qualifying, 7.
The long-standing discrepancies among districts prompted the Department of Education to replace one of the two entrance exams with a new test this year that’s harder to practice for — the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test.
The concern was that parents in wealthy districts could afford to pay for tutors to prepare their kids for the exams — giving those children an advantage over students in high-poverty neighborhoods.
“It seems to me that the poor districts are still doing poorly and the rich districts are still doing well,” said Pamela Wheaton, of Insideschools.org, at The New School. “I think test prep continued and it’s business as usual and there aren’t enough seats for these gifted kids.”