A strange gifted education success story

If expanding access works, is your program really for the “gifted”?

A child takes a standardized test. (Photo by Ridvan Celik via Getty Images)

If you give a test to a bunch of students at the beginning of the year and keep track of the 15 percent with the highest scores, then the odds are good that when you do a year-end assessment, those kids will, on average, be doing way better than average.

Of course, position in the academic rank tables isn’t totally fixed. Because I attended a fancy private high school, I entered Harvard better-educated than a lot of the earnest strivers from random suburban public schools who I met. But those kids were mostly smarter than I am, and within a couple of years of being exposed to the same curriculum, it showed.

But on average, the smartest kids in 2026 are also going to be the smartest kids in 2027 or 2028. A lot of the relevant stuff is inherent, and a lot of the stuff that’s not inherent — like family situation and home environment — is not readily subject to change.

As a result, I think it’s always worth being a little skeptical about claims that extraordinary learning is taking place in selective institutions. If you took that top 15 percent and put them together in a special classroom called the Smart Kids Room, then kids in the Smart Kids Room would do way better on average than kids in the Normal Room. But on its own, that tells next to nothing about the actual instructional effectiveness of the Smart Kids Room.

My read of the evidence is that a lot of what happens in gifted education — especially in the gifted and talented programs and specialized high schools that attract a lot of media attention because they’re in New York City — has essentially zero demonstrated educational value. It’s just sorting across a large population. But a recent Natalie Wexler post on “how to make ‘gifted’ programs more equitable” raises another dilemma of selective education: If we’ve hit on something that we have good reason to believe really works, why are we gating access to it?

A weird G&T success story