The Lie at the Core of Gifted and Talented Programs

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Being “gifted” — and by that I mean smart — has been woven into my sense of self for so long that it has become one of the surest things I know about myself. I was reading at age 4. And though I hated math by kindergarten, I excelled in art, reading, and writing, and every teacher loved me. It was not surprising to me when, in third grade back in 1991, I was invited to take a test to determine whether I should move to a school across town — the school for really smart kids, as I precociously told relatives, neighbors and strangers at the grocery store. Nor was it surprising when my parents told me I had been accepted to that school’s Gifted and Talented program. There, in grades four, five, and six, I had the kind of public-school education that many parents dream of, filled with discovery, creativity, and nerdy magic.

We went tidepooling on the coast, prodding shy sea stars with our fingers, and made papier-mâché dioramas of the titular fruit from James and the Giant Peach. We reenacted the Battle of Lexington and Concord using balled-up paper as bullets and argued about national politics. (Memorably, one debate about George H.W. Bush’s 1988 pledge “Read my lips: no new taxes” ended in shouting.) We went on class camping trips designed to teach the value of emotional risk-taking, pushing ourselves on night hikes to walk solo through a pitch-black tunnel to our teacher on the other side. Our classrooms were always a merry mess of paint and construction paper. I spent most of my in-school silent reading hours with the class copy of The New Yorker. My teachers, thrillingly, asked a lot of me academically, and in return, they gave me the latitude to follow my curiosity. I remember these years as some of the most invigorating of my life.

For nearly a century all across America, shrewd parents have known that the best first step in a child’s academic life is to get them into a gifted program, like the one I attended, where they can have an academic experience that is stimulating and confidence-boosting, that sets them apart from the pack. They understand that a Gifted and Talented, or G&T, program in elementary school broadens a child’s intellectual horizons, which then places them on a course toward honors classes in middle school and AP classes in high school. All of this culminates, finally, in the strategic launch of the child toward “a very good college,” maybe even one in the Ivy League. The first plotted point on the ascent is vital — it’s what makes the rest possible.

Many of these shrewd parents also know that in many parts of the U.S., G&T has a race problem. As of 2022, roughly 60 percent of American students enrolled in a gifted program are white, though recent data shows that white children are only around 40 percent of the total public-school population — a disparity that has been in place for as long as G&T has existed. The gap is apparent in New York. Recent figures on the city’s kindergarten G&T enrollment indicate that white and Asian students are vastly overrepresented relative to their proportion of the city’s student body. The Anderson School, a citywide K–8 gifted institution, barely cracks double digits for Latino students and admits even fewer Black students; the stats for another K–8 citywide gifted school, NEST+M, are no better. The trend continues in high school. Of the 781 students accepted to the highly competitive Stuyvesant High School last year, eight were Black. Among the city’s other eight specialized high schools, 3 percent of offers went to Black students while 6.9 percent went to Latino students. Combined, Black and Latino students make up roughly two-thirds of the city’s public-school population.

These disparities have helped to make G&T a perennial subject of debate, particularly in New York City, where it has bedeviled mayors for years. At the moment, the city’s families with school-age children are waiting to learn how Mayor Zohran Mamdani plans to reshape (or extinguish) G&T, an issue he touched on during his campaign. While he has made plain his distaste for pre-kindergarten G&T testing and feels the third-grade entry point is more logical (Mamdani himself is the product of a specialized public high school, the Bronx High School of Science), thus far no action has been taken.

Some parents I spoke to have already washed their hands of the whole G&T business, refusing to participate in what they view as a corrupt system of segregation. But countless others still place significant stock in the G&T designation and what it offers and are comfortable relying on cognitive testing, should it be required, to determine whether a child qualifies. For decades, people in favor of G&T have promoted the notion that we can put a concrete number to a child’s intelligence, that the smartest children need extra enrichment or acceleration to reach their potential, and that we can measure the beneficial impact of that enhanced learning on the children who receive it.

There is just one problem: Not a single part of this story is true.

According to most definitions proffered by advocacy groups for high-ability children, a child is said to be “gifted” if they perform (or have the potential to perform) at a higher level than other kids their age. Rather than any inherent characteristic, it’s their difference that defines them.

What causes a child to perform at that higher level? A person’s intelligence has been shown to correlate with that of their parents, but researchers view this genetic component as a baseline with which countless life circumstances interact. The number of environmental factors that might impact a child’s intelligence is staggering: their socioeconomic status, and the food, shelter, and stability that it does or does not provide, but also things like level of physical activity or even how much greenery there is in their community. Research suggests that the calibration of nature versus nurture shifts over time, with environmental aspects playing their greatest role when a child is very young. Some theorize that highly gifted children stay in this spongelike developmental window — when factors like enrichment programs, good teachers, and shelves full of books make a big difference — longer than their peers with typical intelligence, which leads to their superior abilities.

But that is just an idea, of course. The bases of high intelligence (and what we even mean when we say “intelligence”) are vast and mysterious, and multiple schools of thought have spent decades battling it out across the landscape of academia. Some educational theorists posit that high intelligence is a single quality that manifests generally in various aspects of thought, while others assert that there are numerous forms of intelligence, such as linguistic, musical, or kinesthetic. Still others say it’s a form of neurodivergence. Research indicates that highly intelligent people are 20 percent percent more likely than their peers to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and 80 percent percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. “I don’t know that there are truly gifted neurotypical children,” says Laura Phillips, a New York pediatric neuropsychologist whose practice includes gifted kids. “One not yet well studied idea about giftedness, and neurodivergent brains in general, is the overexcitability hypothesis, this idea that these kids’ brains are just firing nonstop. They’re so acutely sensitive to information and to stimulation in the environment, and that in and of itself is its own vulnerability.”

Other psychologists reject the notion of a genetic or biological component of intelligence altogether and believe there is no such thing as innate talent or aptitude, that we can all learn anything with the right teacher. In 1972, the U.S. government settled on an official definition of giftedness, which eschewed the longtime standard that any IQ over 130 was “gifted” in favor of six dimensions of high intelligence, including “general intellectual ability, specific academic aptitude, creative or productive thinking, leadership ability, [aptitude in] visual and performing arts,” and high “psychomotor ability.” What all of the theorists agree on is that human cognition is highly complex — the kind of thing that is unlikely to be captured very well on a Scantron.

The first IQ test is credited to psychologist Alfred Binet and was created in 1905. In short order, it was used to identify children who were gifted and those who would benefit from remedial instruction. The 30-question test measured everything from vocabulary to spatial awareness and sought to assign a “mental age” to each person who took it, which was then compared to the subject’s actual age. The figures were later expressed as a ratio: If one’s mental age were 15 and their chronological age were 10, their ratio would be 15:10, which converts to an “intelligence quotient,” or IQ, of 150. The convention of separate instruction for gifted children took hold shortly after, and by 1920, two-thirds of urban schools in the United States grouped advanced learners together.

One of the earliest forms of gifted education arrived in New York in 1922, when psychologist Leta Stetter Hollingworth founded her Special Opportunity Class at P.S. 165, a kind of living laboratory in which 50 students with IQs over 155 were taught and observed for three years. In 1926, Hollingworth published Gifted Children: Their Nature and Nurture, in which she made the case that implementing a G&T program would improve society: “The child should have brought to his attention whatever will most help him … render the maximum service to others,” she wrote, meaning civilization as a whole. By midcentury, the rationale for nurturing gifted youth had grown even more lofty: global dominance. After Sputnik-1’s 1957 launch, as American leaders spiraled over the notion of falling behind the Soviets, NASA was established, the Department of Defense’s research agency was created, and Congress passed legislation to facilitate the surfacing of more gifted kids via widespread testing. The bill’s motive wasn’t subtle: It was named the National Defense Education Act.

The effort was a failure. In 1983, a scathing report published by the Department of Education warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity” among American students, including gifted students, who were falling as short academically as their general-ed peers. Equally damning assertions were made in 1993’s DoE report National Excellence: A Case for Developing America’s Talent and 2004’s National Association for Gifted Children–endorsed A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America’s Brightest Students. The latter described the plight of children who “read shampoo bottles at age three, and read newspaper editorials at age five,” children who “shock their parents and wow their grandparents,” but who, once they reach school, experience a dispiriting letdown. “They’re bored in kindergarten, and they’re bored again in first grade. Year after year, they learn little that they haven’t learned already.” Whatever acceleration G&T programs were trying to provide, their efforts weren’t making smart children any smarter.

In the years after these critiques, Congress passed the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Children and Youth Education Act of 1987, which was designed to increase schools’ ability to meet the needs of gifted children, and which sparked a gradual uptick in the programs’ enrollment. Today, about 3 million children in America are enrolled in Gifted and Talented programs, and 87 percent percent of U.S. districts use cognitive tests to make that assertion, sometimes in concert with other assessments (teacher referrals are in use in 81 percent of programs). But even as G&T testing expanded, some test-makers started to question the infallibility of the tools used to identify accelerated learners, particularly among the pre-K set.

Psychologist Steven Pfeiffer is the author of Serving the Gifted and the creator of the Gifted Rating Scales, one of the most widely used evaluations in G&T. Unlike most other cognitive assessments, the GRS does not involve the student — it’s a teacher and parent evaluation. Educators record observations of intellectual and academic ability, creativity, leadership, and motivation to arrive at a numerical probability of a child’s giftedness. Pfeiffer says that when he entered the gifted testing scene in the early 1990s, the prevailing theory then (and in his view still) was “if we find you gifted at age 4 or 5, then you’re gifted for life, just like you have curly red hair or blue eyes.” But as a clinical psychologist and executive director of Duke University’s gifted program in the late 1990s and early aughts, he noticed that some of the kids he counseled shifted in and out of the gifted IQ range from year to year. In his view, IQ is relatively stable but not immutable, and the only way to populate a gifted program fairly is to evaluate and reevaluate children every couple of years. Research supports Pfeiffer’s observations, showing that children’s cognitive test scores tend to shift dramatically over time as our brains grow and evolve during childhood and adolescence.

Even if educators could devise a test to flawlessly gauge intelligence — assuming it were fixed enough to measure in the first place — they would still need to solve for the various biases that plague these tools. The demeanor of the test administrator or the prejudice of a teacher writing an evaluation can affect the score, as can test prep. While cognitive tests are meant to be “unpreppable,” research has shown that practice tests can familiarize the test-taker with the style of questions asked, making it easier to decode their answers. In effect, a test’s result is a snapshot of a kid’s capabilities that day — how rested, distracted, anxious, or hungry they were — and of the amount of coaching they’ve received. Not only are intelligence tests unreliable, they also carry an ugly history, having been used for everything from selecting soldiers for officer training to justifying forced sterilization. Like a remorseful Oppenheimer of IQ, Alfred Binet lamented misuses of his creation, which he developed to spot strengths and weaknesses, not to stamp a kid with a permanent ruling on what they can and cannot do. His biographers say he would’ve objected to its role in sorting children by ability.

I reviewed several sample questions for those preparing for the Wechsler Preschool Primary Scale of Intelligence, one of several tests used nationwide for evaluating young children for G&T. One question shows four images: a duck, a cow, a cat, and a pig. The test administrator is instructed to say, “Show me the one that says ‘oink.’” But most languages conceptualize pig sounds differently: It’s būbū in Japanese, ood ood in Thai, chrum in Polish, and oi oi in Hindi. Another example shows a different set of four images: a ruler, a thermometer, a telescope, and a weathervane. “Point to the weathervane,” the administrator says. Do most kids know what a weathervane is? No. But with pictures like these, the Wechsler test seeks to determine where a child falls on the Perceptual Reasoning Index, or the speed at which they can fluidly identify the stumbling block (What’s a weathervane?) and arrive at a solution (I know what the other three are, so this must be it). But deducing the answer is only possible if you know what the other items are — and a kid from a comfortable suburban house that may have its own telescope is likely more able to do so than an apartment kid who may never have even seen one.

Subjective assessments, such as teacher evaluations or parental nominations, have their own pitfalls. From 2008 to 2021, New York City public schools used two standardized tests, the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test and Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test, to determine which students qualified for seats in citywide gifted programs. But in 2022, that system was replaced with the current policy, in which  a parent nominates their child, via application, into the city’s G&T evaluation machine, putting them forth to be recommended (or not) by their pre-K teachers. But most adults have an unconscious tendency to mistake cultural capital for intelligence, says Rachel Fish, a professor of education and child study at Smith College. “If a kid comes into school in kindergarten and they’re talking about classical composers or museums they went to, these are some of the ways teachers think of kids as demonstrating smartness, when it’s more reflective of the resources they have.” Teachers can also conflate compliance and intelligence and, conversely, mistake behavioral issues for lack of smarts. Gifted-education expert Joseph Renzulli coined the term “schoolhouse giftedness” to refer to bright kids who excel not only at grasping the material but also at the bureaucracy of schoolwork: things like test-taking and memorization. Without these skills, a smart child may be passed over.

Brooklyn mom Sierra, who, like several people I interviewed, asked to use a pseudonym, feels that the city’s replacement of standardized intelligence tests with parent-and-teacher recommendations has turned the designation of “gifted” into a joke. “When my son was going into kindergarten, there was a small flurry of parents eager to get their kids into G&T, and I was completely flummoxed,” she told me. “Half the kids in question were paste eaters who were screeching in tantrums every time I saw them at pickup.” Her own mom friends were “leery, and skipped the whole thing.” Whether or not these zealous parents believed their child was truly gifted seemed beside the point. In Sierra’s mind, they saw an opportunity for a leg up for their kid, and they took it.

While there are parents who unwittingly discover that their child aced an intelligence test and then seek out a gifted program that will develop that child’s raw talents, far more parents seem to be like those Sierra knows: rushing toward G&T programs because they believe they will provide their child a better education than a mainstream public school, which itself may not be true.

Educators have never settled on a universal answer to what a G&T curriculum should deliver. Should it move faster through material, dig deeper into it, or both?  For decades, the main approaches have been acceleration and enrichment, sometimes referred to as vertical growth and horizontal growth. The former speeds a kid through material so they can skip a grade or graduate early or, if their prowess is in one subject, visit a higher grade’s classroom for advanced study in that subject. Enrichment, meanwhile, encourages a more meaningful grasp of material via creative, interactive, project-based instruction. In New York, five citywide G&T programs are accelerated (enrollment in which is based on testing), while the rest are enrichment-based.

“Enriched programming is highly teacher dependent, because they’re not given guidelines,” says Alina Adams, founder of NYC School Secrets, who has spent decades telling parents how to get their kids into the schools they desire. “Some teachers might take the standard New York City ten-month curriculum and teach it in seven months, then for the other three months bring in their own curriculum. Some teachers might read Charlotte’s Web to their second-graders and then do a field trip to a working farm, or have their kids build a model of a farm. The general-ed class might also read Charlotte’s Web, but they write two paragraphs about it while the G&T kids write five.” The most important thing to know, Adams says, is that G&T and general ed use the same curriculum, just at different depths and content and with teachers of ranging quality. “A parent who had one kid in general ed and one in G&T told me, ‘My kid in G&T has a mediocre teacher and is having a mediocre year. My kid in general ed has a fabulous teacher, and she’s having a fabulous year,’” Adams says. “If you have a teacher who’s passionate, who brings the material to life, it doesn’t matter what the label says.”

Perhaps that’s why I’ve noticed a certain letdown among New York parents of G&T students. After all the testing and lotteries and nail-biting, this is it? A Brooklyn mom, Paulina, described her son’s six years in their neighborhood G&T program, which he just finished, with a kind of verbal shrug. “The kids would catch on quicker, so they would have more time to do a fun project now and then,” she says. The main difference Paulina noticed between G&T and general education was class size. “There were always around 28 kids in G&T, and it was just the one teacher,” she says. “But there were three gen-ed classes in the same grade, and those were all ten-to-12 kids with two teachers.” These are often called inclusion or integrated classrooms, in which children who need special accommodation are placed alongside general-ed students and a paraprofessional assists the classroom’s main teacher. “So some parents transferred their kids from the G&T class to those other classes in around grade two or three, when it started to get more academically challenging, because they felt it was worth it for the kids to get more individual attention.”

Does being grouped with kids of similar high ability offer any tangible benefits? It can certainly stave off a child’s boredom and the behavioral problems that can result from boredom. It can help them deepen a child’s study of a subject of interest and connect them with students who share that interest. But those same benefits could likely occur, or even be enhanced, in a setting that allows every student to both receive enrichment and to proceed through the curriculum at their own pace, a model that has been proposed by numerous education experts.

The potential benefits of separate learning are also highly variable: Is the teacher engaged and committed? Is the district adequately resourced? Is enough time devoted to enrichment activities versus the standard curriculum? The answer is often “no.” A 2024 report by the Fordham Institute put it plainly: “America’s school district policies for advanced learners are mediocre at best.” I ask Lana, who sent her daughter to a G&T program at their neighborhood elementary school on the Upper West Side and her son to the general-ed program at the same school, what differences she noticed in their educational experiences. “Not much difference at all,” she answered. “Not in the curriculum, the homework. I don’t really feel like in the end she learned any more than he did.”

Colorado mom Andrea says her son Jake, now in seventh grade, has benefited enormously from being in a gifted program, but that’s largely because, as a neurodivergent child, he was deeply misunderstood by his mainstream elementary-school teachers. “One said he was ‘reluctant’ to read,” Andrea says. “Another said he ‘refused’ to read. One told me there was no way he had a learning difference because he ‘used big words.’” When Andrea finally had Jake tested, the clinician said her son had “profound, textbook” dyslexia in addition to a very high IQ. Knowing the reason for his struggles was life changing. Jake received appropriate accommodations, switched into a gifted program, and is now excelling and happy. Before his diagnosis and his placement in a gifted program, the lack of understanding and support at school had plunged him into a mental-health crisis.

Whatever approach G&T programs pursue, studies indicate that they don’t have much impact on a student’s immediate academic achievements. Jason Grissom, professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt, co-authored a 2021 study that revealed vanishingly minor gains in test scores among kids in G&T — a 2 percentile point increase in reading scores and a 1 percentile point increase in math scores — and prior research, from 2011 and 2012, indicated much the same. Susan Johnsen, professor emeritus of the department of educational psychology at Baylor University, has written three tests that are used to identify gifted children. She believes it’s essential to figure out how to teach gifted children better, giving them individualized attention that embraces their unique strengths and addresses their particular weaknesses. Fish, the professor from Smith who taught in New Mexico, takes a different view: If the programs aren’t working, why continue to devote more resources to kids who are already mostly succeeding but leave the rest as they are?

While working at a New Mexico school, Fish says she was tasked with teaching a gifted class and a class of students with special needs. “I was handed this robust curriculum for the gifted kids with really cool critical-thinking activities and lots of creative work,” she says. “And I was not supposed to do this, but I used the same curriculum with my kids with disabilities.” The effect was immediate. “My students lit up,” Fish says.

Amid all the talk of tests, recommendations, nominations, lotteries, and Byzantine combinations of the above, what often gets lost is whether any elementary-school gifted program could ever matter as much as it feels like it does. There’s a tweet that surfaces every October: “Going as Former Gifted Child for Halloween and the whole costume is just gonna be people asking ‘What are you supposed to be?’ And me saying ‘I was supposed to be a lot of things.’” Few burdens are as heavy as one’s great promise, which brings with it the eternal prospect of falling short. When I talk with Karen, 48, a Californian who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, she mentions the meme. “There’s so much shame about failure with formerly gifted kids,” she says. “I think there are dangers to labeling kids this way.”

When Karen tested into her state’s gifted program, her elementary school crafted a bespoke G&T program for her, sending her to higher-grade classes for part of the day, calling in volunteers to tutor her, and conscripting her into tutoring younger students. “I was very othered at school,” she says. “And there were expectations from everyone about me being kind of perfect all the time. Once, I got in trouble for missing a cue from the teacher that it was time to be quiet, and my name got written on the board, and everyone was like, ‘Oooooh,’ because I never got in trouble.” Karen had few friends at school. “I was often seated with kids who had behavior problems to be the good influence,” she says.

Karen became a student-services professional at a California college. She says she’s met more struggling former G&T students than she can count. “I’d see them hit a point where they couldn’t just exist in the class and absorb everything anymore. It usually happens in I’d say the second year of college — they get to some science class and they’re like, I don’t know how to study, I’ve gotten all A’s my entire life, and now my identity is crumbling because I’m about to fail this chemistry class.”

When your intelligence is the foundation of your self-perception, failing to achieve feels like soul death. But if the limited amount of information we have about gifted kids long-term is any indication, most lead, at best, ordinary lives of modest accomplishment. A 35-year study of 677 gifted children found that by age 50, only 12.3 percent had reached a level of “eminence,” defined as “full professors … Fortune 500 executives … judges and lawyers, leaders in biomedicine, award-winning journalists and writers.” This means 88 percent never did.

The subtextual premise of G&T is that early ability is a predictor of future success — that if a child’s precocious aptitude isn’t nurtured, it may well fade away. Zach Hambrick, professor of cognition and cognitive neuroscience at Michigan State University, co-authored a 2025 study of 34,000 individuals at the height of their fields — Nobel laureates, Olympic athletes, chess masters — to find out whether high performers early in life are the same folks who reach these pinnacles. By and large, they aren’t. Hambrick explains that “people who make it to the top at the youth level specialize early. They focus very intensively early on and shoot up to the top.” But most of these practitioners don’t make it past the initial ascent. “Whereas world-class performers at the ultimate level progress more gradually,” Hambrick says. “Early on, they may perform at a lower level than the people they’ll later surpass. But they keep progressing. And people who reach the world-class level tend to specialize a little later.”

I ask Hambrick, a Ph.D. who has published dozens of journal articles and won awards for his scholarship, if he was in a G&T program as a child. “On the contrary,” he says. “I lost interest in school around fourth grade — I did very poorly, C’s and B’s, even some F’s. Did very poorly on the SAT, which limited my college options. But once I got to college, there were people who knew deeply about things, and that was very appealing to me. I got interested in learning, you might say. And that was transformative.”

Cognitive psychologist Amy Lynne Shelton, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, doesn’t like the term gifted. CTY, as the center is known, has offered large-scale summer educational programs for high-ability kids since the late ’70s. (To be admitted, a child must demonstrate that they perform well above grade level, with test scores at or above the 98th percentile.) Shelton says the center doesn’t even use the word gifted — they prefer advanced learner — and that she frames the conversation less around a designation and more a determination of need. “We try not to make it reward-based, like, ‘Oh, you’re special,’ but more about, ‘We’re talking about what you need and what you can do,’” Shelton says.

Several former G&T kids told me how often they were warned not to brag about the designation. One described her survivor’s guilt, all those kids staying put as she left for special instruction, all of them watching her go. Another spoke of feeling awkward as the mainstream kids watched him do one of the fun, creative projects he got to do that the others didn’t. The invitation for self-comparison is as toxic as it is irresistible, and adults tacitly condone it by sorting kids in the first place.

Participation in G&T can also teach kids that one’s value is conferred, like some divine decree, by others. During my reporting, I wondered if my childhood school district still had my own G&T documentation. I inquired, the district mailed my proverbial permanent record, and amid school photos and immunization logs I found three sheets of paper: one, a letter to my parents saying I’d aced the program’s preliminary screening and they recommended I undergo G&T testing. Two, a rundown of the score I got on the gifted ed test, the WISC-R, a version of the aforementioned Wechsler. And three, another letter to my parents, stating that while my score did not qualify me for the gifted program — I was a point shy, scoring “very superior” on the verbal scale and “average” on the one that measured logic and sequencing — I could still switch to the other school to participate in its enrichment track. I’d never gotten into G&T at all. They say they don’t recall, but I assume my parents lied to protect my feelings.

I don’t care about the lie; I can envision telling it to my own child if the need ever arose. What stuns me is the horror I felt upon reading this news — the embarrassment, the shame of having felt so superior. The faint, irrational worry that maybe I’m not who I thought I was. I’m 44 years old. I’ve just spent months reporting on the hollowness of America’s gifted education apparatus, of the term itself, of cognitive testing specifically. And yet: Once I read through those papers and learned what I learned, I set them down, walked into the bathroom, and threw up.