New York City is a regular Lake Wobegon, where all the kids are above average — at least according to Christine Quinn. The mayoral hopeful has announced that she wants to expand by 8,900 the number of seats in New York’s gifted and talented programs. Why stop there? Why not just put all the students into a gifted and talented program and pretend they’re all geniuses?
In part, Quinn says she’s worried that “our gifted and talented programs in no way, shape or form reflect the diversity of our city.” But she also suggests that middle- and upper-class kids don’t have enough rigorous school options in the city.
These two problems are really the same problem. New York’s public-school system is broken. But Quinn’s solution — to relax the requirements to get into the gifted programs by allowing students to get in on teacher recommendations rather than exam scores — is not going to improve matters. It’s just another way to mask the problem.
The notion that the best schools in the city do not have a sufficiently high proportion of racial minorities has become a regular drumbeat from the city’s liberal politicians and The New York Times. Take Stuyvesant High School, for instance: Hispanics make up 2.4 percent of the school’s enrollment compared with 40.3 percent of the system. Blacks make up 32 percent of the city’s public-school students, but are 1.2 percent of Stuyvesant’s student population.
So there is pressure to make such programs less dependent on test scores for admissions. But as Chester Finn, co-author of a recent book called “Exam Schools,” explains, “The benefit of test-based admission is that it has at least the appearance of complete objectivity and transparency and makes it relatively easy to resist manipulation, favoritism, and political pressure.” Meaning that all those upper-class families won’t be able to game the system by getting better recommendations out of teachers.
The other benefit (if you can call it that) of these exams is that they remind us of how poorly the city is serving poor and minority populations. These tests are not racist. They simply, as a spokesman for Kaplan once told me about the SATs, report the news. And the news is that we are not doing a very good job of educating minorities.
Flavia Romero tells me that her son Richardson was already in danger of being left behind at first grade in PS 165. Which is not surprising really, given that only 34 percent of the school’s third-graders passed that grade’s exams in 2010.
Romero did not call the school to demand that the test be changed or that any requirements for third grade be waived. Instead, she tried to figure out how her son could learn the things he was not learning in school. For Romero, who came here from the Dominican Republic five years ago and whose English is shaky, this was not an easy task. But then she found Appleseed Workshop, a tutoring group in her neighborhood that pairs Columbia University student tutors with local kids.
In its first year, Appleseed, a nonprofit, had 35 students, almost all black and Hispanic. Students are charged $70 a week and are encouraged to come at least three times a week for two hours at a time. Many come more. And if they can’t afford the price, the founder, Zach Bretz, lets them pay less. (Bretz is a 26-year-old UPenn graduate who grew up in the neighborhood and moved back in with his mother to reduce his cost of living while launching Appleseed.)
Tomas Carrillo had made it through half of first grade without learning how to count, let alone read any words. His mother, Solvita, an immigrant from Latvia who works as a home aide, says it was a “nightmare.” And the teachers kept telling her that her son “must have ADHD or something.” Since starting at Appleseed in February, he has learned numbers and reading. But Solvita cannot figure out “what happens in the seven hours a day he is at school.”
What the Carillos and the Romeros have figured out is what countless East Asian immigrants already know. The way to get your children a real education in this city is to send kids for hour upon hour of private tutoring to make up for what they don’t get the rest of the day.
Whether it’s Kumon or SchoolPlus or Appleseed, cram schools, as they are often called by their detractors, are now doing the job that the Department of Education pays about $20,000 per pupil for.
As Zach Bretz tells me, tutoring centers like his are “addressing the shortcomings of public-school systems. We are trying to level the playing field, to give poor kids an education comparable to what private-school families can afford.”
Says Bretz, all of these students — not just the rich ones or the Asian ones — “are capable of greatness.” Bretz dreams big, but unlike certain politicians, he doesn’t pretend we’re there yet.