A radical proposal by city officials to scrap gifted-and-talented programs as part of a larger overhaul of the school system will cause a flood of Asian parents to flee the city, a community organizer told The Post.
“It’s already happening,” said Chinese parent activist Linda Lam. “And if they get rid of gifted-and-talented programs, you are going to see a mass exodus of people to Long Island. There is no doubt about it.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s School Diversity Advisory Group recommended disbanding the gifted and talented program and most academic screening practices in a Tuesday report.
Already disillusioned by a stalled city plan that would slash their numbers at the city’s specialized high schools, some Chinese parents are defecting to schools in Nassau County, Lam said.
With increasing urgency, posters on Chinese parent groups on the social media network WeChat have been exchanging information about desirable school districts in towns like Jericho.
“The sentiment is very bad right now,” Lam said. “People are confused. They want to know what is going on with education in New York City.”
Tied to their jobs in the city, Lam said Chinese parents are hunting for proximate Nassau districts that would allow them to commute to work.
Nixing academic screening at all elementary and middle schools, Lam said, would trigger a rush for the exits.
There were a total of 15,979 kids enrolled in gifted-and-talented programs in 2018, according to the DOE.
Asians had the highest rate of enrollment at 40%, followed by whites at 33%, Hispanics at 12% and blacks at 9%, the DOE said.
“This is extremely important for us,” Lam argued. “For many people, this is the ticket out of poverty. The Chinese community believes that if you work hard then you get into these schools and you will eventually get into college and have a good career.”
SDAG’s report acknowledged that its policy could lead to some departures from the system. But co-chair Maya Wiley argued at a Tuesday press conference that the proposal’s “enrichment” options would actually draw more parents.
“Part of why we are advocating for more enrichment programs is because the research shows it attracts more of those parents,” she argued.
SDAG member Vanessa Leung, of the Coalition for Asian-American Children and Families, argued in favor of the SDAG recommendations at the press conference.
The status quo enables “systemic harms against black and Latinx students and communities but also ignores the barriers faced by many within the Asian Pacific American community,” she said. “For decades, increasingly exclusionary admissions practices makes it challenging for a vast majority of Asian students to navigate the system for their families and themselves.”
While some predicted a stampede out of the system, Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center education professor David Bloomfield said those scenarios are unlikely. “The idea of extreme white or Asian or wealth-based flight is exaggerated,” he said.
Bloomfield said more middle-class families would enroll in formerly low-income schools – a demographic shift that would “make the transition more palatable.”