Gifted Education Needs Guidance

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Separate schools. Special assignments. Getting pulled out of class. Gifted education can take many forms or even none at all. The instruction of America’s high-achieving kids is disjointed and disorganized, an often overlooked issue in the crowded world of education policy. However, recent debates on affirmative action in selective high schools and discussions of the underrepresentation of minority groups in gifted education have made the issue more relevant than ever. As these issues continue to percolate in the background of the many challenges that the education sector already faces, solutions to widespread problems in gifted education will not emerge without official guidance. 

The state of gifted education today is haphazard, although the same may be said about its history. The concept of gifted programs in the United States can be traced back to the 1860s, when William Torrey Harris, superintendent of St. Louis public schools, pioneered a system in which students could be promoted every 5 weeks, dependent on their classroom performance. In the early 1900s, Harris’ ideas started to take hold as schools began separating gifted children, providing them with different learning material. By the 1920s, gifted programs went a step further as experimental schools arose. Still, gifted education was largely a limited concept until the Cold War and the Soviet launch of Sputnik brought the importance of young minds to the national stage. Fearing the seemingly imminent loss to the Soviets in the space race, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, hoping to identify and foster the nation’s most intelligent youth. The NDEA’s 1957 passage, however, corresponded neatly with the country-wide reckoning over desegregation, prompted by the 1954 Brown v. Board decision. “Giftedness” came to be a synonym for “white,” and students of color were often, although not necessarily openly, restricted from accelerated programs. “Intelligence” became an important yet indescribable marker, a reason to once again separate and categorize students. 

The NDEA, however, with its segregationist undertones, did little to ease growing American anxieties about falling behind their foreign counterparts. In 1983, A Nation At Risk, a report issued by a commission formed by then-secretary of Education Terrel H. Bell, was published, advocating for education reform while claiming young Americans were undereducated compared to students in other countries. The report sent shock waves across the education sector, stating that the “mediocrity” of contemporary U.S. education “threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” The reaction to A Nation at Risk spurred the creation of several research centers devoted to gifted education, as well as further government reports on the lackluster education of high-achievers in the United States. Despite this, there is currently no overarching government policy or funding regarding gifted education, and each state determines its own curriculum and identification requirements. 

In their current state, gifted programs are far from perfect. Students in said programs tend to be white and higher income, widening the achievement gap as Black and Latino students are underrepresented. Around 6% of students nationally are identified as gifted, but over 13% of Asian and 7% of white students receive this demarcation, while under 5% of Black and Latino students do. This lack of representation, in part a remnant of test-based systems that disadvantage children of diverse backgrounds, can have long-lasting negative impacts. Children in gifted programs find benefits such as higher self-concept and improved scores on exams, with math and reading comprehension scores out of 100 found to be 8.9 and 5.8 points higher, respectively. Excluding marginalized groups from such positives based on tests conducted at young ages will simply continue to drag certain groups of students down. Furthermore, gatekeeping, intentionally or not, the concept of gifted education from particular demographics makes it increasingly difficult for them to get a foot in the door, adding further challenge to creating change.

Many forms of gifted education also rely heavily on separation, worsening the divide between the gifted and non-gifted and thus the aforementioned achievement gaps. In fact, the separate and differentiated education of students can create feelings of exclusivity that may have negative impacts on relationships between those identified as gifted and those who are not. Furthermore, labeling students as “gifted” or not can put them into educational boxes that follow them throughout their schooling career. Labels, both “positive,” such as “gifted” or “advanced,” and negative, such as “unmotivated” or “slow learner,” have wide-ranging psychological effects. Students labeled as gifted can become subject to perfectionism or unattainable expectations from themselves, parents, peers, and teachers. And students subject to labels of any sort are at risk for viewing their descriptor as a permanent condition. While students in gifted programs may be told that they are “special,” non-identified students found themselves “less motivated” when it came to “domain-general ability.” 

However, the issues with gifted education extend beyond identification and labels; there’s also the problem of direction. The definition of “gifted” is left up to each state and, in some cases, each individual county or school. This leads to wildly different outcomes, with most definitions being highly subjective, not to mention variable. Virginia, for example, defines gifted students as those who “demonstrate high levels of accomplishment or who show the potential for higher levels of accomplishment when compared to others of the same age, experience, or environment,” while Florida defines giftedness as “students who have superior intellectual development.” South Dakota, on the other hand, has no state definition of a gifted student. Such differentiations in state gifted programs mean that the education received by a gifted child in one school looks very different from that of a child at another school. This creates a system in which gifted education is given room to fall by the wayside and between the cracks, relying on overtaxed schools and individual states to regulate the aforementioned issues. 

Simply put, it’s time that gifted education gets some guidance. Without a national understanding of what “gifted” means, it is nearly impossible for states to eliminate issues of inequality in identification or to clear up problems of labeling. Unfortunately, this is no simple task. With the Trump administration threatening drastic cuts to the Department of Education’s budget, the confusing world of gifted education is liable to get even murkier. Thus, it is becoming increasingly important for Congress to utilize the decades of research that have gone into investigating gifted education to create policy defining what it means to be a “gifted student” and laying out curriculum requirements and guidance on how schools should educate their highest achieving. Simple federal advice on how to teach gifted students may not solve the plethora of problems brought by current gifted education programs, but it will go a long way in illuminating a path forward.   

The first step in creating change is a definition of giftedness. Rather than relying on past test scores to determine students' intellectual abilities, gifted programs should focus on potential for growth. In fact, the current focus on early-childhood intelligence for gifted identification would have excluded some of the world’s brightest minds, including Albert Einstein, who was slow in learning to speak, a significant handicap in a system where gifted identification often relies on “strong language skills.” With this in mind, the term “gifted” should be embedded in federal policy to identify students with high prospects for potential, rather than elementary schoolers with high test scores. This more standardized guidance can be a springboard upon which to base recommendations for educating students. Congress should convene a panel of gifted education researchers to create teacher recommendations, including not elevating gifted students as “superior” while giving them a chance to collaborate and holistically develop. With the issue of gifted education brought to national attention, understandings of giftedness solidified, and student potential used to inform educational recommendations, the future of America’s most talented students can become brighter than ever.

The world of education is wide and complex, and teachers, school districts, and even states find themselves in constant battles over funding, programs, and curriculums. However, we should not allow our high-achieving students to slip through the cracks of this busy system. Nationally recognized guidance on how to educate high achievers and a standardized definition of “gifted” are needed to help begin to heal the disparities that exist in today’s convoluted system of gifted education.