Editor’s note: This was first published on Mike Petrilli’s Substack, SCHOOLED.
Based on my inbox and social media feeds, the big education news over the past few weeks was Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to scrap New York City’s gifted education program in grades K–2—and the fierce backlash it sparked. I suspect that might surprise some of my left-leaning friends, for whom this discussion is likely largely invisible. I think that’s telling. And why I’m writing this.
It’s not that Mamdani’s proposal is actually all that terrible. The Big Apple is a real outlier in starting its gifted program so early, and in making tiny tikes leave their neighborhood schools and trek across town to other campuses. As former New York Daily News editor Josh Greenman (the father of a gifted-program participant himself) wrote the other day, all of us should have mixed feelings about New York’s program design.
A much better approach—one endorsed by the (ideologically diverse) National Working Group on Advanced Education that I chaired back in 2023—is to provide advanced education at every elementary school for their top students. Under Mayor Eric Adams, New York has been moving in that direction, and with it, has been diversifying its gifted education population. But it still starts in kindergarten and now relies on teacher recommendations, which can introduce all kinds of bias.
Still, I suspect that most of the folks on the right and center who responded angrily to Mandani’s proposal didn’t get past the headlines. “Socialist wants to kill gifted education” surely triggered some PTSD among these folks, as it harkens back to the darkest days of the Great Awokening when any effort to promote “merit” or “excellence” was branded as racist. As AEI’s James Pethokoukis put it, “true equality shouldn’t mean slowing the swift. How is this not obvious?” Or cue the Wall Street Journal editorial page: “Socialism in a nutshell: A persistent fear that somebody, somewhere, might be getting ahead and ought to be yanked back.”
As a booster of advanced education, though, it bothers me that this issue is so polarized. A recurring theme of my writing—and this newsletter—is that reform advocates should always want our preferred policies to gain bipartisan support. That’s not always possible (see: private school choice) but when it is, it makes for a stronger and more durable coalition.
But eliminating gifted education isn’t something that should only rile up conservatives or “neoliberals.” The left should worry about academically talented kids, too, especially those from marginalized backgrounds. Once such students get older, progressive groups have been strong in their support of efforts to challenge them. Organizations such as Education Trust have long promoted initiatives to expand access to advanced courses in high school. And increasingly, these groups are getting behind acceleration at the middle school level, too, with widening support for “automatic enrollment into advanced courses” policies, as we’re seeing in North Carolina, Texas, and Washington. An initiative to promote such policies even won a big award last week at the PIE Network’s Eddies ceremony—a sign that ed reformers across the ideological spectrum think this is a good idea.
But gifted education in elementary school? That’s a much harder sell. Fordham did some fact finding last year to determine the level of support for such initiatives among reform groups and education philanthropists, and the results were disheartening. Almost nobody wanted to touch it.
Maybe it’s the term “gifted,” which is burdened with a suspect, progressive-era history. It smacks of determinism, of early sorting. But I also think it’s something about the identifying, and separating, kids when they are so young that rubs many folks on the left the wrong way.
So here’s my suggestion for depolarizing “gifted education,” including in elementary school (much of which is in line with what the Working Group recommended two years ago):
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Drop the “gifted” label and talk about “advanced education” instead.
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Take equity concerns seriously by embracing “universal screening” to identify kids with academic talent, such as through tests that everybody takes, rather than relying on parental nominations or teacher recommendations, which can introduce racial and class bias.
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Build advanced education initiatives into every elementary school in the country, serving at least the top 10 percent of students in each campus. In some schools—typically high-poverty ones—some of those students won’t be all that high performing compared to district, state, or national “norms.” But with support and challenge, lots more will turn out to show great potential and can catch up to their high-achieving peers. Such students will be disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and from low-income families. This is how to close the “excellence gap” and build a diverse pipeline into higher education (including selective colleges) and beyond.
That’s my recipe. Will it work? What else might help to gain support for such efforts at the elementary level, in order to make “advanced education” a bipartisan issue? Please weigh in!
