The real problem with “gifted” education

It’s almost all selection effects! We should care more about actual efficacy in teaching.

Private school students participate in a STEM activity called “discovery tubes,” which involves watching marbles descend through a tube. (Photo by MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images)

Katie Arnold-Ratliff wrote a cover story for New York Magazine criticizing N.Y.C.’s gifted and talented program in public schools that lands on a headline claim I think is staggeringly wrong: either there is no such thing as a “gifted” child or else no way of reliably identifying one.

In making her case, she characterizes a 2019 study by Brian Bernstein, Camilla Benbow, and David Lubinski on the life outcomes of intellectually precocious youth as supporting her skepticism of giftedness.

Arnold-Ratliff notes that “only” — her word — 12.3 percent of youth identified as gifted had achieved the standard of eminence used by the researchers. The standard they set for eminence, however, is very high: “full professors at research-intensive universities, Fortune 500 executives, distinguished judges and lawyers, leaders in biomedicine, award-winning journalists and writers.”

Twelve percent is obviously a pretty small minority, but that’s still wildly above the baseline level of achievement!

You also have to assume that for every award-winning journalist and writer, there are two or three schlubs like me enjoying decent career success without ever winning an award. Similarly, if you’re the C.F.O. of the 512th largest corporation in the United States or just a normal everyday medical doctor, that’s clearly an above-average level of achievement relative to the whole population.

So I think this critique of gifted and talented is wrong, and, as I’ve written before, the push to eliminate tracking in K-12 schools is extremely misguided, especially since there are pretty straightforward ways to address the most valid critiques of how kids are identified for advanced math classes.

At the same time, I do think the N.Y.C. gifted and talented programming deserves criticism, though my complaint is roughly the opposite of the one that Arnold-Ratliff offered.

Precisely because you really can identify which kids are the most promising ones in a pretty reliable way, the mere fact that the graduates of a gifted program do well in life does not convey any information at all about whether the program is actually any good.

If you read accounts of what’s happening in G&T, you’ll see that it’s a lot of special activities that have nothing to do with basic principles like “give the smartest kids harder math problems so they learn more.” And the research on the causal impact shows not much is going on.

The level of fighting over who gets into this program and whether it’s unfair is wildly out of proportion to the scrutiny of its actual educational efficacy.

And unfortunately, this is the case almost everywhere in American education, whether it’s the link between “good schools” and property values, the practical operation of charter and public school choice programs, the tuition that people pay for private school, or the battles over who gets into exam schools or gifted programs.

Parents are just massively, massively under-rating the power of selection effects and wasting a lot of time, money, and political capital.

Many selective programs have minimal impact