I was just introduced to Eduwonkette. She has some pretty great stuff on her blog at  Education Week. She writes about current events in education from preK to college- and does so with good cheeky commentary. Plus, I really like her avatar!

This week she has been blogging about the Gifted and Talented programs. She did some charts and analysis and her conclusion is: Brooklyn and the Bronx lose out and Manhattan wins! How is this possible if Joel Klein says his original intention was to create universal access to G and T programs? (see press release below).

"Today, there’s limited access to gifted and talented education in
some districts. The opposite is true in other districts. We want to
create universal opportunity—and dramatically increase the numbers of
students testing for, and hopefully entering, gifted and talented
programs."

-Joel Klein, October 29, 2007 Press Release

This is Eduwonkette’s analysis and her excellent charts. See how we Brooklynites fared below. (Thanks purple dressed, yellow caped fly girl!)

This fall, New York City adopted a uniform system for gifted and
talented admissions. Educational equity, we were told, was the reason
for this reform; New York City has long operated a decentralized
network of gifted programs, and the conventional wisdom is that more
affluent community districts had more than their fair share of these
programs. Tapping into this debate, Joel Klein framed his reform as a
mechanism to increase access to poor and minority kids.

Last
week, the Department of Education released the number of kids
qualifying for gifted and talented programs by community school
district (those scoring at or above the 90th percentile on the OLSAT
and Bracken School Readiness Assesment qualified). The DOE did not
release socioeconomic or demographic breakdowns, but one way to get at
the equity question is to look at which districts won and lost under
the new system.

Did poor kids gain ground? The graph below,
which plots the percent change in the number of students offered gifted
seats in the entry grades against the percentage of students qualifying
for free lunch in the district suggests that the answer is no. On average, districts with higher proportions of poor kids saw declines in gifted admissions.
 
Make no mistake – NYC’s poorer community school districts lost out under the new gifted and talented admissions process. On Monday,
I discussed the change in gifted seats by district, but some readers
asked for the overall percentage of kids in each district that are
classified as gifted.

You can find the full figures for 2007 and 2008 below. Overall, the big
winner in entry grade seats is Manhattan, and Brooklyn and the Bronx
lost the most.

Percentage of Students Classified as Gifted and Talented, 2007 and 2008

This is Karen again here- In case you are wondering (as I was), which district you are in, here is a very general breakdown. (I used my listing for selected public schools for this) and thanks to the information at www.insideschools.org

District 14- Williamsburg, Bushwick
District 13- Brooklyn Heights, Prospect Heights, Clinton Hill, Fort Greene,
District 15- Brooklyn Heights, Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill, Park Slope
District 20- Bay Ridge
District 18- East Flatbush

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