No, That's Not What "the Research" Says About Exam Schools

The New Yorker has just run a piece by Jessica Winter about New York City’s endless controversies over its gifted & talented programs generally and specifically its famed exam schools, special high schools that require students to do well on a standardized test and boast many famed alumni, schools like Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science. As is always true of American education reporting, the piece is really about meritocracy, opportunity, and racial inequality.

Because New York is New York, the roiling debates about these programs and schools are often used as a microcosm of the broader American educational landscape. The enduring controversy is that these programs and these schools demonstrate the same racial inequities that are present in schooling writ large - Asian students are significantly overrepresented relative to their portion of the population, Hispanic students are somewhat underrepresented, and Black students are significantly underrepresented. Racial inequality in public schooling, as I’ve said many times, has been the obsessive focus of the policy apparatus for at least 45 years. In general, achievement gap fixation has crowded out many more fundamental questions - for example, whether to spend on gifted & talented programs or exam schools. As that NYT piece points out, just paying for the exam that sorts students into specialized high schools will cost NYC $17 million.

I’m not very moved by the whole gifted & talented debate. On the one hand, progressive criticisms of the existence of such programs do reflect the broader Official Dogma and all of its problems, that is to say, a rigidly environmentalist view of academic potential that suggests that our overarching problem is an inexplicable societal decision to only give the best educations to the most privileged, and that if we got rid of the whole concept of being gifted or talented and insisted on pure educational egalitarianism, there would be no academic hierarchy and no academic inequality. This is, to put it mildly, not compatible with reality. On the other hand, I’m not super invested in this topic because there’s really no evidence that G&T programs actually improve outcomes (Winter conspicuously doesn’t provide any) and the kids who would be in such programs are going to be fine because… they’re gifted and talented. Possessing the pre-entry ability necessary to get into these programs is vastly more valuable than attending them, and an immense amount of data supports that