'''Leave Every Child Behind
In de Blasio’s world, excellence deserves punishment. New York City’s School Diversity Advisory Group brims with handpicked comrades of Mayor Bill de Blasio and his schools chancellor, Richard Carranza. New York City’s School Diversity Advisory Group brims with handpicked comrades of Mayor Bill de Blasio and his schools chancellor, Richard Carranza. This race-obsessed panel recently demanded the elimination of all Gifted & Talented programs in Gotham’s government schools. The SDAG proposes to sacrifice NYC’s high-achieving children on the altar of “equity and inclusion.” This cadre of bean-counters sees advanced students actually learning and immediately invokes the Deep South. An SDAG report last month called New York’s merit-based G&T campuses “as segregated as the schools of Mississippi and Alabama.” Perhaps deliberately, this provocative comparison conjures emotional memories of Birmingham’s Jim Crow–era commissioner of public safety, Bull Connor, a Democrat, aiming fire hoses at black kids.
Gotham’s parents reacted fiercely to SDAG’s rotten advice. Left-wing politicians and commentators who normally applaud most any liberal scheme balked at SDAG’s War on Gifted Children. This brainstorm was too much even for United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew, who seems to favor any plan to destroy educational opportunity. “Every community has children who could thrive in a gifted and talented program, and it is our responsibility to help our children reach their full potential,” he stated. “We do not support the elimination of the city’s gifted and talented programs.” Former state assemblyman Michael Benjamin, a Democrat representing the Bronx, wrote in the New York Post, “Team Carranza doesn’t simply want to level the playing field; they want to dig it up and salt it.” Benjamin and his brothers are G&T alumni from the Bronx. He recalled his G&T times as “the finest years of my young school life. I felt as though I finally belonged. I didn’t have to hold back, and I had to run to keep up academically.” He added that the best way to help black and Latino children attend the best high schools “shouldn’t be to dig out the pipeline, but to restore it.”
New York City Council member Robert Cornegy, a Democrat representing Bedford-Stuyvesant, dismissed SDAG’s scheme in a New York Post op-ed headlined “How Gifted and Talented Programs Boost Minorities.” “Excellence in education means providing each student the opportunity to achieve,” Cornegy wrote. He then turned the tables on SDAG’s racemongers: “Rather than seeing these programs as an impediment to diversity in our schools, I see these programs as a catalyst for helping children from black and brown communities get into specialized high schools.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/bill-de-blasio-new-york-school-policy-gifted-and-talented-programs/