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Mayor Bill de Blasio is phasing out New York’s Gifted and Talented program for the smartest young students of the Big Apple, The Post confirmed.
In a major act in the final months of his administration, de Blasio ends the selective agenda that critics say unfairly favors young white and Asian Americans, as well as middle-income families.
Current students in the program will remain in accelerated learning classes, but they will be completely phased out by fall 2022, ending current testing for the city’s 4-year-olds.
The city said it would instead offer a new model of accelerated learning for all students.
This will increase the number of schools offering accelerated learning from the current 80 to all of the 800 with elementary grades, the education ministry says.
It will also mean more than 26 times as many students can receive it, depending on the city – from 2,500 to all of the city’s 65,000 kindergarten students.
The 4,000 kindergarten teachers will need additional training to prepare, and the city will hire additional teachers trained in accelerated learning in areas with historically little or no gifted and talented programs.
Seven teams of specialist experts will also be on hand to help implement the new large-scale proposals.
All students entering third grade will be screened in different subjects to see if they would benefit from tailor-made accelerated instruction – but they will stay in regular classrooms, according to the plan.
The accelerated model will also focus on real-world skills, with topics such as coding, robotics, and even community advocacy.
The sweeping change comes after critics accused the current model of favoring white and Asian American students, who make up about 75 percent of the G&T system.
Critics have also said it unfairly favors richer families who are able to pay guardians to help prepare their 4-year-olds for the tests.
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