It is just a metal door with three windows, the kind meant to keep the noise of a school hallway from disturbing the quiet of the classroom. Other than paint the color of bubble gum, it is unremarkable. 

But the pink door on Room 311 at Public School 163 on New York’s Upper West Side represents an educational divide. On one side are 21 fourth graders labelled gifted and talented.

And they are mostly white. 

On the other side, sometimes sitting for reading lessons on the floor of the hallway, are those in the school’s vast majority who are enrolled in general or special education programs. 

They are mostly children of colour. 

The bright kids get brighter and the rest fall further behind

For critics, this image crystallises what they say is a flawed system that reinforces racial separation in the city’s schools and contributes to huge differences in achievement. 

They contend that the gifted and talented programs favour middle-class children, many of them white or Asian, over black and Hispanic children who might have equal promise. The favoured group is offered an education that is enriched and accelerated whilst the other gets a bare-bones version of the material.

“It is well known in the education community that the tests advantage children from wealthier families and disadvantage children from poorer families,” says Columbia University education professor James Borland.

“So the kids who are thought of as the least able end up with the fewest opportunities and resources and positive learning environments,” adds Jeannie Oakes, author of Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality. 

Clearly, accelerated classrooms for the gifted create a cycle in which students who start out ahead get even further ahead.

For example, an analysis of the progress made by 2,500 six and seven-year-olds in English state primary schools in England, conducted by academics at the Institute of Education in London, found that the use of streaming appears to entrench educational disadvantage compared with the results of pupils who were taught in all-ability classes. 

Without the opportunity to mix with high-achieving role models, children placed in the bottom stream did worse in maths and reading than similar children in mixed-ability classes. But those in the gifted classrooms, the top stream, did better than their peers in mixed-ability classes. 

In other words, streaming makes the brightest children brighter but does little to help the rest to catch up.