High-achieving students who are also disadvantaged by class, race, or ethnicity may be the most overlooked group in American education. Education reporters, ask yourself: The last time you visited a high-poverty elementary school, did you query the principal or teachers about how they serve children who are a year or more above grade level? Who arrive on the first day having already mastered that year’s material?
If the answer is no, you’re hardly alone. Stories about advanced education are too few and far between. One indicator: A simple Google News search for “gifted education” turns up 1/1,000 as many articles as a search for “special education.”
Yet advanced learners shouldn’t be ignored. Nobody should go to class and not learn anything new—not kids three grade levels behind, nor three grade levels above. Like all children, they deserve to attend schools that notice them and meet their needs.
Kids from disadvantage who are nonetheless ready for advanced learning opportunities have so much to contribute to the country. Like other high achievers, they have great potential to be tomorrow’s breakthrough scientists, to lead organizations, and to solve the world’s problems.
These are also the children with the best shot at diversifying our college campuses—especially in the wake of June’s affirmative action decision—as well as our graduate schools, professions, and elite institutions.
We know these kids won’t “be fine” just because they are smart. Reams of research shows that low-income gifted kids are much more likely than their more affluent peers to see their achievement decline as they move through school. Just as kids who have fallen far behind in the Covid era need intensive support to catch up, so do high flyers need intensive support to keep moving ahead.
That’s the message from the National Working Group on Advanced Education, a racially and ideologically diverse group of scholars, practitioners, and policymakers that I convened over the past year. Its recent report, Building a Wider, More Diverse Pipeline of Advanced Learners, offers thirty-six concrete, evidence-based recommendations for districts, charter schools, and states.
Several of them carry implications for reporters and analysts covering this important student population.
For example, journalists might ask their local districts:
- Are their advanced learning opportunities appropriately robust? For example, do they offer gifted programs at all elementary schools, including high-poverty ones? Are there ample opportunities to enter selective schools or programs? A large selection of Advanced Placement and dual-enrollment courses at every high school?
- Are they stuck in a “scarcity mindset” or focused on opening up advanced learning to all students who can benefit from it? Some states explicitly limit gifted programming and the like to a tiny percentage of students, like the 3 percent of kids scoring at the very top of an IQ test. The focus is on “whom to let in” rather than “how many can we serve.” A smarter approach, embraced by a handful of states such as North Carolina, is to offer programming to a larger group, like the top 10 percent of students in every school.
- How do they identify kids who would benefit from advanced education programs, honors courses, or dual-enrollment opportunities? Reporters should push to determine whether bias is baked into districts’ processes. We know, for example, that requiring parent or teacher recommendations is more likely to overlook kids of color and those from low-income homes. A better approach is “universal screening”—using a widely used assessment, like the MAP or the state test, to identify all kids who could benefit from advanced learning.
- Are districts falling into an “all or nothing” trap? Few kids are “advanced” in everything. Well-crafted programs target services to individual needs. For example, some second-graders could benefit from being placed in a fourth-grade classroom for math, but should stay with their same-age peers for reading. Some need just a little more challenge within an on-level course, while others could benefit from an honors class. Are schools working toward that sort of individualization?
- Are kids falling through the cracks as they get older? Districts should automatically offer their gifted students the opportunity to enroll in advanced courses in middle school and high school. Do they? Or do kids drop out of the pipeline? Are poor kids and kids of color more likely to do so? Do local districts even check their data to find out?
To their credit, several education reporters are already doing excellent work covering advanced learners.
This has become a major focus for Sara Randazzo at the Wall Street Journal, for example, whose article went viral on the absurdity of eliminating honors courses “because equity.”
The 74’s Jo Napolitano offered a great example of “solutions journalism” in her write-up of Dallas’s success in boosting the diversity of students taking advanced coursework.
Kudos also to Elizabeth Heubeck at Education Week for her profile of a Black gifted-education coordinator in Virginia who is dramatically boosting the number of Black and Hispanic students in advanced education.
In all three cases, the journalists rejected the frame that gifted education and the like is inevitably inequitable. More of that please! These stories are out there, waiting to be told. And telling more of them is apt to make good things happen for kids.
Editor’s note: A version of this article was first published by The Grade.
