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A push to get more students to take the city’s gifted and talented test this year paid off: over a thousand more students took the citywide admissions tests this year, with the overall number rising to 39,160 from 38,015 last year.

But the outreach efforts did not increase the number of students admitted to the program’s most selective citywide programs. In fact, the number of students who qualified for the citywide programs declined. The number of students who qualified for the less selective district-based gifted and talented programs, which require slightly lower test scores for admission, did increase, growing by 319 students from last year.

The racial and family income backgrounds of the students whose test scores made them eligible for gifted and talented were not immediately available.

The city sent letters to qualifying students this morning, whose families now get to list the programs they prefer and hope for a spot in the program of their choice.

A place in the citywide programs is not guaranteed. Last year, 1,788 kindergartners qualified for about 300 seats. This year, the number of kindergartners making the cutoff is slightly larger, though the overall number of students who qualified for the citywide programs dropped by 149 students. (more…)

Advocates for gifted children in the Riverdale section of the northwest Bronx are shaking their heads in disbelief — and disgust.

The Department of Education’s rules for admission to gifted and talented programs have shut some qualified children in Riverdale out of the program located in their own zoned school. At the same time apparent changes in the rules allow several students who didn’t qualify under the city’s rules to be added to district’s other gifted class at the discretion of that school’s principal.

Two years ago, the city decided that children would have to meet a citywide standard for admission to gifted programs in each borough. The goal was to increase equity and access to the programs, DOE officials said at the time. (more…)

Hundreds of city parents who spent the weekend hitting their e-mail refresh button now know which gifted and talented program has accepted their child.

Word came first in the form of e-mails sent at the hoppin’ hour of, in one reader’s case, 1:20 Saturday morning. (That was an hour and 20 minutes after the city’s self-appointed (and extended) deadline to start notifying families.) Others, according to this blogger, still hadn’t heard as of 10 p.m. yesterday. Snail-mail notice is expected to land in mailboxes today, a schools spokesman, Andrew Jacob, said.

The most interesting piece of news, though, will be where these parents decide to go. Many of the families applying to gifted programs also applied to private schools, and some are reporting choosing between the two kinds of kindergartens. Will the economy cause parents to spurn private schools? (more…)

Anyone who stayed until the bitter end of a three-hour meeting last night about kindergarten waitlists in Manhattan got a surprise: an uncharacteristic apology from a top DOE official.

Hundreds of parents turned out for a meeting of the parent council for District 2 to vent about having been shut out, at least for now, of their neighborhood schools. Last week, Manhattan parents protested at City Hall after 273 children were put on waiting lists at many elementary schools.

Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm arrived late to the meeting after spending her afternoon dealing with the swine flu outbreak in Queens. She sat quietly in the audience and listened to a tense back and forth between school officials and angry parents. The auditorium had mostly emptied and council members were preparing to adjourn when Grimm approached the microphone to make a surprise statement, which I captured on video above. Here’s a key part of what she said:

I also want to say something that I thought I heard people from the DOE say tonight, but just in case you didn’t, I want to say, I’m sorry. We’re sorry. We have stumbled on some of this planning.

The two officials leading the meeting told parents during the meeting that most schools should be able to eliminate their wait lists by the middle of June, after families find out where they’ve been offered seats in gifted and talented programs. John White, who heads the Department of Education’s efforts to manage school space, said that more children in each area qualified for gifted admissions than there are children on the waiting list. (more…)

A chart produced by the Department of Education that shows the number of children qualifying for gifted programs in each district, compared to last year.

Nearly 50 percent more incoming kindergartners scored high enough on two nationally normed assessments to be eligible for a seat in a gifted and talented program, according to data released today by the Department of Education. The percentage of test-takers who qualified also increased, from 18 to 22 percent.

The jump in participation shows that the standardized procedures the DOE established last year for admission to gifted programs are gaining traction, DOE spokesman Andrew Jacob told me today. ”It reflects that families are more familiar with the way we’re running the admissions process,” he said.

The increased number of students eligible for gifted programs could be seen as a feather in the cap for the DOE, which has said it wants to expand access to gifted programs to children citywide, particularly in communities that have not had robust gifted programs in the past. Jacob told me the department this year ramped up its outreach to prekindergarten programs in districts where too few children took the tests and scored high enough last year to warrant opening programs.

“We wanted to find as many children as possible in the city who could meet the standard that we set,” he said.

In terms of sheer numbers, some of the biggest gains happened in districts that already enroll many children in gifted programs, including the districts comprising Staten Island and most of Manhattan below 96th Street. (more…)

A public school principal in Fort Greene is asking for a public, face-to-face meeting with concerned community members after Internet and newspaper reports described dissatisfaction with his leadership.

One report, in the Brooklyn Paper, said unhappiness with the principal, Sean Keaton, of the Clinton Hill School, P.S. 20, is behind a surge of interest in the nearby Community Roots charter school. Another report, at Insideschools.org, includes a parent describing Keaton as “authoritarian,” “hostile,” and “abusive.” The frustration comes as a flood of middle class families are moving to the Brooklyn neighborhood – and often searching for options outside P.S. 20, their zoned school. The Brooklyn Paper reported that only 27% of kindergarten-aged students zoned for P.S. 20 attend it.

Parents posting in the comments sections of the Times blog and at Insideschools said they feel Keaton shuts them out of the school. One said that he has a “closed door policy to the parents.” (more…)

When results of the Department of Education’s screening for gifted and talented programs came out last year, parents of qualifying children had two major complaints: that the ultra-elite programs were all located in Manhattan, and that some districts didn’t have gifted kindergarten classes.

Today, the department revealed the locations of three new programs reserved for the highest-scoring children throughout the city; All three are in Brooklyn and Queens. And back in October, before screening for the programs even started, the DOE announced that all district gifted programs would now begin in kindergarten.

I became familiar with parents’ complaints last year because I was then blogging at Insideschools.org, the site that many parents use to research schools. My posts about gifted and talented admissions got hundreds of comments, such as this one:

The three programs announced today could double the number of seats in citywide gifted programs, depending on whether families choose to enroll in them. But that would still mean that fewer than half of the children qualifying for the programs last year could be accommodated. (more…)